SIMD-0133: Syscall: Get Epoch Stake

proposals/0133-syscall-get-epoch-stake.md

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+---
+simd: '0133'
+title: Syscall Get-Epoch-Stake
+authors:
+  - Joe Caulfield (Anza)
+category: Standard
+type: Core
+status: Draft
+created: 2024-03-25
+feature: (fill in with feature tracking issues once accepted)
+---
+
+## Summary
+
+A syscall to retrieve a vote account's delegated stake for the current epoch.
+
+## Motivation
+
+Currently, on-chain programs have no knowledge of the current epoch's stake and
+how much active stake is delegated to a certain vote account.
+
+If this data was available for querying by on-chain programs, it would unblock
+many use cases, such as validator governance and secondary consensus mechanisms,
+that were previously not possible on Solana.
+
+Additionally, this would enable the Feature Gate program defined in
+[SIMD 0089](./0089-programify-feature-gate.md) to tally vote account stake in
+support for a pending feature gate.
+
+## Alternatives Considered
+
+An alternative design has been proposed in the past for using an on-chain sysvar
+account to store all of the current epoch's stake. It was proposed in
+[SIMD 0056](https://github.com/solana-foundation/solana-improvement-documents/pull/56).
+
+Using a sysvar account to store even just the current epoch's stake introduces a
+size limitation on the number of entries that can be stored, which the number of
+validators on Solana could surpass in the future.
+
+By offering access to this information through only a syscall, we can avoid this
+account maximum size constraint. However, the syscall approach also makes the
+data more cumbersome to retrieve off-chain than the sysvar approach.
+
+While retrieving this data off-chain may not be straightforward, it remains
+entirely feasible. Conversely, on-chain programs currently do not have this
+capability at all.
+
+## New Terminology
+
+N/A.
+
+## Detailed Design
+
+The specification for the proposed syscall is as follows:
+
+```c
+/**
+ * Retrieves the total active stake delegated to a vote account for the current
+ * epoch.
+ *
+ * @param var_addr      VM memory address to copy the retrieved data to.
+ * @param vote_address  The vote account whose stake to query.
+ * @return              A 64-bit unsigned integer error code:
+ *                        - 0 if the operation is successful.
+ *                        - Non-zero error code.
+ *
+ * If the operation is not successful, data will not be written to the
+ * provided VM memory address.
+ */
+uint64_t sol_get_epoch_stake(
+  /* r1 */ uint8_t *    var_addr,
+  /* r2 */ void const * vote_address,
+);
+```
+
+`var_addr` must be the starting address of at least 8 bytes of writable VM
+memory to store the `u64` response. If not, the syscall will abort the VM with
+an access violation.
+
+If the provided vote address corresponds to an account that is not a vote
+account or does not exist, the syscall will write `0` for active stake. 
+
+## Impact
+
+This new syscall directly unlocks highly relevant network data for a wide range
+of protocols. Developers seeking to access vote account stake will be positively
+impacted.
+
+## Security Considerations
+
+This new syscall introduces the same security considerations as the rest of the
+syscalls in the existing interface, which manipulate raw pointers to VM memory
+and must be implemented with care.
+
+A potential pitfall in the implementation could come when comparing the act of
+writing a `0` to the VM memory for active stake versus returning a `0` for
+success. The two should not be conflated.
+