Resources

This book is opinionated and aimed at one path through sBPF: validate, mutate, CPI, exit. The materials below cover the rest of the territory: bytecode specifications, runtime internals, alternative pedagogies, and the tools you reach for past the basics. Treat this page as a map; nothing here is required reading to follow the book.

ISA references

Authoritative sources for the instruction set itself, including encoding details this book does not reproduce.

• bpf.wtf 0x03: the sBPF ISA. Richard Patel's consolidation of solana_rbpf, the disassembler, the Solana LLVM fork, and Capstone into one reference. Useful for: opcode hex bytes, the three competing assembler dialects, the lddw "it is really a 64-bit mov" clarifier, and the le / be encoding.
• Solana sBPF specification. The Foundation's draft spec. Lags real runtime behaviour at times; cross-check against rbpf if anything looks off.
• solana_rbpf Rust API docs. The interpreter and JIT in source form, the closest thing to a reference implementation.

Syscall references

• bpf.wtf 0x04: syscalls. The dispatch mechanism (Murmur3 hash in the call immediate), the registry concept, and the per-syscall behaviour notes.
• Agave syscall definitions. The actual code each call <name> reaches. Read this when a syscall behaves in a way the docs do not predict.
• Pinocchio syscall bindings. The Rust-side declarations of the same syscalls; useful when porting a Pinocchio reference implementation to asm.

Guides and tutorials

• Helius: How to write Solana programs in sBPF assembly. Article-length walkthrough of a single program.
• Blueshift course: sBPF assembly track. Multi-lesson course with exercises.
• dasmac opcode guide. Example-first reference. Each opcode and syscall links to a short program that exercises it; useful when you want to see an instruction in context.

Example repositories

Hand-written programs to read after the Example Programs chapter.

• solana-developers/program-examples. Anchor / Native / Steel / asm variants of the same program, side by side. Read for the comparison.
• blueshift-gg/sbpf. The toolchain repo. examples/ contains the canonical asm reference programs (sbpf-asm-counter, sbpf-asm-vault, sbpf-asm-cpi).
• dasmac/hello-dasmac. asm and Pinocchio implementations of the same program, with a dump.sh that produces side-by-side disassembly. Useful for measuring Rust overhead on a problem you understand.
• bidhan-a/sbpf-asm-escrow. Community-written escrow with SPL Token CPIs and a multi-PDA state machine.

Tools

• sbpf. Assembler, deploy wrapper, disassembler. The toolchain this book targets.
• LiteSVM. In-process Solana runtime for tests. Faster than solana-test-validator and gives you direct access to compute unit counts.
• asm.sbpf.dev. Browser playground. Edit, assemble, and inspect disassembly without leaving the tab.
• SBPF VS Code extension. Syntax highlighting and basic LSP features.

Talks

• "Writing Optimised Solana Programs" by Dean Little. The motivating talk for most of this book's CU-conscious framing.

A note on freshness

The Solana runtime changes between SIMDs. Opcodes are stable; syscall hashes are stable; the specific CU cost of a given syscall is not. Any number in this book or in the resources above is approximate, and the only way to get a real answer is to run your real program against the runtime version you intend to deploy on. Use Compute Units as a planning tool and measurement as the source of truth.