Shredcaster

Shredcaster is a lightweight standalone utility for any Solana full node, including validators, RPC nodes, and Mithril verifying nodes, that forwards shreds captured at the TVU to external UDP listeners. Support for shreds produced during a validator’s leader slots is coming soon for validator deployments.

Key benefits:

1. Standalone design – Requires little or no modification to the Solana client codebase. Note: If XDP-based broadcast is enabled by a validator, a small change is required to forward shreds during leader slots (will be completed soon)

2. No node disruption – Works without restarting or reconfiguring the node.

3. Minimal performance overhead – Uses eXpress Data Path (XDP) for efficient zero-copy packet forwarding.

4. Multi-recipient forwarding – Supports sending shreds to multiple UDP listeners simultaneously.

Architecture

Running Shredcaster

Building

bpf-linker is required to compile the BPF probe which monitors TVU traffic.

cargo build --release -p shredcaster

Running

Elevated privileges are required to run shredcaster

To view the help menu:

sudo ./target/release/shredcaster --help

Example:

sudo ./target/release/shredcaster --tvu-ports 9000 --iface eth0 --listeners 127.0.0.1:5000

This monitors incoming Turbine shreds on UDP port 9000 and interface eth0, forwarding this traffic to a UDP socket running on 127.0.0.1:5000

--listeners 127.0.0.1:5000 --listeners 127.0.0.1:5001

Listeners can be local or remote addresses, and multiple TVU ports are supported.

Monitoring

Watching TVU broadcast is currently a work in progress. It can be enabled with the --watch-egress flag