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Technical proposal SIMD-0093 Activated

Disable Bpf loader V2 program deployment

  1. Idea
  2. Draft
  3. Review
  4. Accept
  5. Implement
  6. Active

Decision brief

Why this proposal matters

Disable BPF Loader V2 for program deployment.

Source-backed reading aid · source language: EN

Proposal at a glance

What changes

  • Disable BPF Loader V2 for program deployment.

Stakeholder map

Who is affected

Builders & client teams Medium impact

New programs will no longer be deployable with Bpf loader V2. People will have to migrate their program deployment to a new Bpf loader, i.e. V3 or V4.

Action may be required
Validators & operators Medium impact

New programs will no longer be deployable with Bpf loader V2. People will have to migrate their program deployment to a new Bpf loader, i.e. V3 or V4.

Action may be required
Users & stakers Impact unknown

No proposal-specific evidence was found for this group.

Action requirement unknown
Governance & ecosystem Impact unknown

No proposal-specific evidence was found for this group.

Action requirement unknown

Exact source revision

Full proposal document

Source-language document. Technical identifiers and evidence remain unchanged. 0616093b2952

Summary

Disable BPF Loader V2 for program deployment.

Motivation

An account on solana network is defined by the following struct. In the struct, the bool metadata field executable was used to indicate whether the account is executable by program runtime.

pub struct Account {
    pub lamports: u64,
    pub data: Vec<u8>,
    pub owner: Pubkey,
    pub executable: bool,
    pub rent_epoch: Epoch,
}

We want to deprecate the usage of executable metadata on accounts for program runtime. The new variant of Bpf loader (i.e. V3/V4 etc.) no longer requires executable metadata. However, the old Bpf loader (v2) still uses executable metadata during its program deployment. And this is a blocker for deprecating the usage of executable metadata for program runtime. Therefore, as we are migrating from the old Bpf loader V2 to the new Bpf loader (V3/V4), we are going to add a feature to disable old V2 Bpf program deployment so that we can activate the feature and deprecate executable metadata in program runtime for the new kinds of Bpf loaders.

Alternatives Considered

None

New Terminology

None

Detailed Design

When the feature - "disable bpf loader instructions" is activated, no program of bpf loader V2 can be deployed. Any such deployment attempt will result in a "UnsupportedProgramId" error.

The PR for this work is at https://github.com/solana-labs/solana/pull/34194

Impact

  1. New programs will no longer be deployable with Bpf loader V2. People will have to migrate their program deployment to a new Bpf loader, i.e. V3 or V4.

Security Considerations

Because when the feature is activated, people should have already migrated their new programs to Bpf loader V3/V4. And existing already-deployed Bpf loader V2 programs will still run correctly. Hence, there should be no security concerns.

Backwards Compatibility

Incompatible.

Evidence graph

Related proposals and rollout

One or more sources are unavailable.

Upstream review record

Upstream discussion & review

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simd.watch community discussion · SIMD-0093

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Provenance

Evidence & technical details

Rollout or chain data, source revisions, freshness and integrity.
3

SIMD

Deployment Status

Document lifecycleActivated
CategoryCore protocol
Devnetactive Epoch 659
Testnetactive Epoch 608
Mainnet-Betaactive Epoch 601
7WeS1vfPRgeeoXArLh7879YcB9mgE9ktjPDtajXeWfXn

Exact source revision

Sources & integrity

  • Proposal document pinned_commit_blob
    0616093b2952ed6de52c4a27d66aadd11d48d4f9
  • simd-document document · stale · Sep 11, 2026
    0616093b2952ed6de52c4a27d66aadd11d48d4f9

One or more sources are unavailable.

One or more sources are unavailable.