Bitcoin Forum

With Bitmain's recent release of the source code that is needed to build AntMiner firmware images we have decided to start a community project to provide improved and customized firmware builds for all AntMiner products that use an embedded operating system. These builds will currently be built independently from the engineering group in China that releases the official builds.

Disclaimer
These builds are unofficial and WILL NOT be covered by Bitmain's warranty. Anyone using firmware builds from this project should be familiar with the relevant recovery procedures. On the S1 and S3 this means a TTL diag cable is needed and on the S2 S4 S4+ S5 and C1 a SD card and reader is required.

Once fully tested builds based off of this project may be released with warranty support but for the moment no builds here have warranty support.

Project Goals:
Improve security by testing/auditing software applications and keeping software up to date.
Keep software in sync with upstream sources as much as possible.
Improved reliability by having community software testing.
Document the software and build systems used in order to make it easier for others to contribute.
Add features to improve management monitoring and automation of large scale industrial mining farms.
Add features to make it easier for home miners to set up, configure and monitor their miners.

For reference Bitmain uses 2 primary types of controllers.
For the S1 and S3 they use a AR9331 based control card that uses the MIPS architecture with internal flash memory.
The beaglebone based controllers are ARM based and come in 2 variants.
Controllers with internal NAND flash include the S4+ and S5
Controllers that use SD cards include the S2 S4 and C1


Current Status:
S1
Firmware from S3 can be loaded but needs to be modified for compatibility.
S2
Tested but unable to hash
S3
OpenWRT firmware based off of trunk sources compiles and runs reasonably well. Source code needs to be cleaned up and tested more.
Patches need to be submitted upstream to OpenWRT for native AR9331 board support.
S4
Untested but similar to S5
S4+
Untested but similar to S5
S5
Compiles and runs without issues but needs to be brought up to date with mainline Angstrom Linux
C1
Untested but similar to S5

We have started a github repo based off of the released Bitmain source code with some cleanup.
https://github.com/AntMinerCE

Who we are looking for:
Software developers who can make improvements to the firmware.
Testers who can provide detailed bug reports and test new features/changes.

TODO List:
Setup Continuous Integration testing and automated builds.
Download server for nightly builds.
Cleanup and Document sources so that others can more easily join the project.
Bring software components up to date.
Transition to mainline cgminer.

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OK - I'm looking at this and seeing a waste of time.
Anyone can mess with the firmware and make it look better or whatever
- my S2 firmware release I'll do soon will be a lot better than the standard S2.

But the problem is what Bitmain has done to cgminer.
They broke the API so it is no longer backward compatible.
They added code in their driver to drop shares, based on stupidity (on p2pool it throws away valid blocks) - the driver is not suppose to do that at all.
They added code in their S2 driver to pass unchecked shares to the pool to get the pool to do the diff checking work rather than cgminer doing it.
They store 6000 work items in the S2 SPI kernel driver for some obscure unknown reason.
Meh it's been over a year since I did this, not sure what else I saw in there.

Basically the problem with Bitmain is their cg*iner driver.
Remove their version and use the fixed master cgminer version - for the S1 and S2 so far.

I've again (today) released another AntS1 cgminer updated to the latest cgminer code.
That is the code they should be using, not their borked version.
They've ignored it since I released it back on 24 Mar 2014
They've ignored the S2 release since I released it 11 months ago.

And then they go and say that you void your warranty if you fix it.
Meh.

I've not looked at the S3 yet ... that's after I do the S2.

Edit: seems my rant made the first post be updated - they will have unsupported builds using the official cgminer ... until further notice.

EDIT: Kano has uploaded binaries for S1-3 here:
https://github.com/kanoi/cgminer-binaries

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Bitmain, I would like to help you dev.

To clarify, the goals of this project include integration of mainline cgminer into the firmware images.

We also want to keep the base Linux OS and other utilities up to date as much as possible

We also intend to release tested versions as firmware upgrades with full warranty support, versions that have not undergone full testing and approval would however not have warranty support.

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Guess that means well never See  BFG support .

 I'll say it again I  like both CG and BFG .

why not give us that choice ? .   >:(

The code is all there in the open.

My S1 release is not a firmware, just a binary.
I paid for my first S1, Bitmain provided another one much later.

My S2 release firmware is created by me - I fixed the bitmain firmware and added in a working cgminer.
Bitmain did not pay for my S2, they just shipped it and it arrived in pieces and then did the warranty fixing it.

BFG copies code from cgminer regularly - it started off being forked from cgminer and most of the important changes are copied from cgminer ...
e.g. the Klondike driver that Chris Savery wrote and then I rewrote a lot of it, got copied straight into BFG ... but then hacked to use an unreliable libusb :P

Now that things are open, BFGMiner support is planned as well (at least for the S5).
There's a lot of code to go through, though, so it might be a few weeks still.

P.S. Ignore the cgminer trolls' lies.

Please ignore the racist, zealot, bigot's lies coz he makes statements without proof coz he never can prove them.

Ladies and Gentleman - kano! Making it impossible to work with on community projects since...well the first time anyone tried to do that with him.

Heh cgminer clone crony.
Who (back in Dec 2013) chucked a tantrum in IRC coz I told him he was wrong when he repeated something incorrect that his boss told him.
... and more than a month before saying he wasn't going to support cgminer any more coz GPU (the final piece of altcoin support) was removed and he wasn't personally told in advance ... coz he didn't read the forum :P
http://pastebin.com/SSUf6VRa

He's backed the alt-coin miner rather than the BTC miner :P

As for the points you quoted of mine above they are easy to provide records showing he is what I said.
The easiest one is to look in the block chain and see item 2 locked in there so many times over and over forever :)

No wonder my antminer C1 Acting odds ( beeping even the connection status alive , and then stop hashing for awhile, few seconds from that  its running again as usual with status restart) when  they found valid blocks from blockchain  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1051699.0) , well if its true bitmain has 'hidden agenda' in their miner drive , it would make ordinary people like me with no programming skill less trust with the bitcoin it self .

Ps : anyone here knows  how to install CG miner to antminer C1 instead of using the firmware ? sorry for the noobish question

There's no real 'hidden agenda' Bitmain just doesn't have time to keep everything up to date. Cgminer is only one part of the firmware needed to run the miner, the Linux OS, kernel drivers and some other utilities are also required. Its not really feasible to update cgminer without replacing the image since its a built as a ram only filesystem(which reduces the chance of flash memory corruption significantly).

Was there a gminer that these two, c & bf, forked from?

8 )

Cgminer was forked from cpuminer and bfgminer forked from cgminer.

cpuminer was the original.
Con Kolivas forked that to make cgminer, the CPU/GPU miner.
I joined the cgminer project to add FPGA/ASIC support.
When GPU mining died, Con and Kano forked the collaborative project into the present-day cgminer (he retained the name/repository), and later rewrote FPGA/ASIC support (as well as removed CPU/GPU support).
I have continued to maintain and improve the original CPU/GPU/FPGA/ASIC project under the name BFGMiner.

cgminer was forked from cpuminer.
bfgminer (the name I came up with and he stole from me) was forked from cgminer.

Fork:
https://github.com/luke-jr/bfgminer/commit/b9df56511c7bd1a2e1f075e9c184c1a4b0f1ba20

Luke's lies proven to be lies:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=78192.msg1467026#msg1467026

Basically what happened was:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=28402.msg1000946#msg1000946

Which in short version is:
1) I updated the icarus software in my git and talked about it in IRC in the channel where we discussed #cgminer
and it was tested on the biggest collection of icarus boards anyone knew about - by xiangfu
2) About a month later luke-jr created a pull request for the same change.
His code hadn't been tested on windows at all (which he said himself) and didn't work on windows.
3) I tested my code in my git on windows after getting my windows build environment working again
(my windows build environment had been dead for about a month so I hadn't pushed my changes to master cgminer yet)
and I found my code didn't work properly on windows either and made a change to fix it in my git
4) I tried my fix on his version on windows and it didn't work.
5) I created a pull request to master with my code (with the windows fix) that overrode his changes
6) He forked cgminer basically because of this.

My IRC comments in the cgminer channel coming up with the BFGMiner name well before the fork:

... and an amusing post ...
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=28402.msg1369274#msg1369274

Here's something I've been working on that should help out with making testing on the S1 and S3 safer, uboot http recovery interface. Once flashed it can be accessed by holding the reset button for 3 seconds after a reboot, this will be useful for those who don't have a ttl cable for recovery but still want to flash custom builds. I still need to make some changes and finalize the procedure for flashing uboot from within OpenWRT.

https://i.imgur.com/LNjx9MM.png (http://imgur.com/LNjx9MM)

WOW nice can't wait to try it out on my S3 just to test it .Will it work for S5 's later on ?.









cya

S5 just uses a SD card based recovery like the other beaglebone based AntMiners so it would be pointless there, it's also pretty specific to the chipset used on the S1 and S3 and porting it would not be easy.

Thought so was making sure . :) That came to mine after i asked .

TY

Figured I would give an update on how things are going, the initial board support patch for the S1 has now been submitted for inclusion in mainline OpenWRT, S3 support should follow shortly after, there will probably some cleanup after that is done to get all the defaults set up properly.

This would be a great option to have. Bitmain should implement this in their own firmware someday...