Block 198040 ... another private fork of p2pool ?

running two separate computers is the very idea of Armory (one for the offline wallet and one for the watching-only wallet).

With my USB stick I could do everything on the same PC:
- boot normally from harddisk: internet connection, bitcoind and Armory watching-only wallet. Create unsigned tx and save to the fat partition on the stick
- boot from USB, sign the tx with offline Armory (this needs no block chain)
- reboot from harddisk and send the signed transaction

whenever the system is booted from its harddisk the wallet on the encrypted part of the stick is securely hidden

I have the full Linux system with offline Armory in an encrypted partition on the same stick as the fat32 partition I use for transaction exchange.
- when a system is booted from the stick no processes on the possibly infected system are running
- when the stick is inserted into a running system everything except the data partition is encrypted and can't be changed
- malware on the online computer could destroy my offline OS but not install anything into it

this is the reason why I boot from the USB and no storage component of the host computer is part of the file system in the running OS

yes, that is my intent 

USB Stick has a small FAT partition for exchanging the transactions and exporting the watching only wallets,
 a boot partition and LVM on a Luks encrypted partition for the OS

I want to be able to boot it on any computer or even a VM and be sure to cut any links to the evil world 

wow that was simple    I changed the assignment of STATICPYTHON to .so and now Armory runs offline on a bootable USB stick that has never seen a network - and I created my first wallet !

next step will be recompiling the kernel to get rid of all network and bluetooth modules to be safe when booting on a machine with a network connection ....

many thanks for the help 

I am trying to build Armory from source (linux openSUSE 12.2, 32bit) and have a problem making Swig - it requires a static libpython which I do not have on my system ... libpython.2.7.so exists, but no static library ... is it possible to link dynamically ?

and testing lower than maximum TC is worth checking out

I found that my best hash rate came with max allocation 80 and -g 1 on a 5850 ... cgminer sets TC 5760 instead of 7200

Now I am running with max allocation 100, --thread-concurrency 5760 -g1 and my rate is 277 Kh/s (tc 7200 gives 257 Kh/s)
p2pool's rate estimate confirms the reported speed, so I think that I found my optimum

btw my earlier report of good hash rate with max allocation 40 / 50 was erroneous: 2 GPU Threads with TC 2880 produced many invalid shares reported by p2pool but they were counted as accepted shares in cgminer
(lowering intensity eliminates the invalid shares but reduces hash rate)

time to switch my other machines to LTC mining (cards 5870, 6790 and 2 different AMD APUs to optimize *lol*)

I just tried to mine with GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS=0 ... got 247 Kh/s and cgminer used 66% CPU
without it I have 259 Kh/s and CPU usage is at 1%


and let me add: on my 5850 exporting GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT=50 lets me start 2 GPU threads and increases rate to 274 Kh/s
(40% abut the same hash rate) ... it uses TC 2880 instead of TC 7200 with 100% ...

up from 60% I must use -g 1

I am excited !
git pull - make - start with the export and -D -T

 [2012-07-25 17:28:35] CL Platform vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.                   
 [2012-07-25 17:28:35] CL Platform name: AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing                   
 [2012-07-25 17:28:35] CL Platform version: OpenCL 1.2 AMD-APP (938.1)                   
 [2012-07-25 17:28:35] List of devices:                   
 [2012-07-25 17:28:35]  0       Cypress                   
 [2012-07-25 17:28:35] Selected 0: Cypress                   
 [2012-07-25 17:28:35] Long-polling activated for http://p2p:9327/long-polling                   
 [2012-07-25 17:28:35] Preferred vector width reported 4                   
 [2012-07-25 17:28:35] Max work group size reported 256                   
 [2012-07-25 17:28:35] Max mem alloc size is 536870912                   
 [2012-07-25 17:28:35] Selecting scrypt kernel                   
 [2012-07-25 17:28:35] GPU 0: selecting lookup gap of 2                   
 [2012-07-25 17:28:35] GPU 0: selecting thread concurrency of 7200                   
 [2012-07-25 17:28:35] No binary found, generating from source                   
 [2012-07-25 17:28:35] Setting worksize to 256                   
 [2012-07-25 17:28:35] cl_amd_media_ops found, setting BITALIGN                   
 [2012-07-25 17:28:35] BFI_INT patch requiring device found, patched source with BFI_INT                   
 [2012-07-25 17:28:35] CompilerOptions: -D LOOKUP_GAP=2 -D CONCURRENT_THREADS=7200 -D WORKSIZE=256 -D BITALIGN -D BFI_INT -D GOFFSET                   
 [2012-07-25 17:28:38] X-Roll-Ntime expiry set to 10

cgminer crashed but restarting with -g 1 lets it hash away with about 260 kH/s :-)


ATM it runs with
DISPLAY=:0 GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT=100 ../cgminerltc/cgminer -o http://p2p:9327 -u x -p y --scrypt --shaders 1440 -I 15 -g 1 --auto-fan --auto-gpu --gpu-engine 600-900 --gpu-memclock 1000 --temp-cutoff 85 --gpu-fan 20-70 --temp-overheat 75 --temp-target 65

-I 15 seems to be the sweet spot, only 3 kH/s less than -I 16  but 0.x% rejects instead of >10%


Thanks again !   ... and I may later try lower tc with -g 2 and expermient more :-)

Wow - I am leaving work and was planning to try the parameter at home - and now I see that you already did my homework :-)


many thanks !!!

AMD Buffer size problem  (cause of my performance woes with 5850)

I found an interesting thread on AMD Developer Central today: "Large buffers"  http://devgurus.amd.com/message/1282913#1282913

user drallan presents a workaround for the low maximum allocation: allocating several memory chunks and addressing everything as one block ...


maybe the thread will go on and bring more ideas

I am going to try setting "GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT" when I get at my machine after work

thanks for the hints ... I will try them ... after having some sleep and a day at work :-)

system RAM is 2GB ... no other hungry processes running

I know that Linux drivers from AMD are not very good - with more than 1 card it can be a lottery to get the X server up without freezing the system ...

is there any chance another driver version has a higher memory buffer limit ?

After a very good experience mining BTC with cgminer on p2pool for a few months I decided to try the scrypt version on one of my machines.

my experience with a 5850 is worse than what others report:

$ cgminer -o http://my_local_p2pool:9327 -u x -p y --scrypt --shaders 1440 -I 10

is doing only about 83 Kh/s

GPU 0: 83.5 / 83.6 Mh/s | A:129  R:3  HW:0  U:27.80/m  I:10
69.5 C  F: 34% (1819 RPM)  E: 900 MHz  M: 1000 Mhz  V: 1.118V  A: 99% P: 0%
Last initialised: [2012-07-25 02:24:44]
Intensity: 10
Thread 0: 41.6 Mh/s Enabled ALIVE
Thread 1: 41.9 Mh/s Enabled ALIVE


any higher intensity does not really work. p2pool logs many messages like this:

2012-07-25 02:32:18.484973 Worker x submitted share with hash > target:
2012-07-25 02:32:18.485073     Hash:   5a417c48970ce4d87e9b4c082f855a656a90a0e8e0e50a3c62c0dc6273e03b97
2012-07-25 02:32:18.485106     Target: 6b8bd775c948180000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000


at intensity 13 the hash rate estimate of p2pool stays way below 100, but cgminer reports about 250Kh/s and no rejected shares !

GPU 0: 242.5 / 93.2 Mh/s | A:270  R:3  HW:0  U:34.04/m  I:13
70.5 C  F: 60% (3633 RPM)  E: 900 MHz  M: 1000 Mhz  V: 1.118V  A: 99% P: 0%
Last initialised: [2012-07-25 02:24:44]
Intensity: 13
Thread 0: 123.9 Mh/s Enabled ALIVE
Thread 1: 126.5 Mh/s Enabled ALIVE


my configuration:
Linux 3.1.10-1.9 x86_64 GNU/Linux
AMD SDK V2.7
fglrx driver 12.6
cgminer commit bff58c3bed937bd027e46907acd1eab7327e838b compiled from git


cgminer -D -T reports

 [2012-07-25 02:11:38] Preferred vector width reported 4
 [2012-07-25 02:11:38] Max work group size reported 256
 [2012-07-25 02:11:38] Max mem alloc size is 134217728
 [2012-07-25 02:11:38] Selecting scrypt kernel
 [2012-07-25 02:11:38] GPU 0: selecting lookup gap of 2
 [2012-07-25 02:11:38] GPU 0: selecting thread concurrency of 1440
 [2012-07-25 02:11:38] Loaded binary image scrypt120724Cypressglg2tc1440w256l8.bin
 [2012-07-25 02:11:38] Initialising kernel scrypt120724.cl with bitalign, 1 vectors and worksize 256   
 [2012-07-25 02:11:38] Creating scrypt buffer sized 134217728
 [2012-07-25 02:11:38] initCl() finished. Found Cypress


any ideas what is wrong here ?

it might be better to really power the system off instead of rebooting - I noticed that when I "killed" a card by overclocking (seeking the highest stable speed) that a reboot did not suffice for the card to recover ...

I can't tell you why it crashes ... but I experienced the same problem at booting machines with 2 or more ATI cards.

Linux 64bit, any version of fglrx ... sometimes the machine locks up hard when it tries to start X ... next try may succeed or not ... whenever I get it to start up I am sure to avoid shutting down as long as possible ...

this forum is full of useful information - I got much out of it without being able to post ...
the restriction after deciding to join is a minor nuisance at worst

I enjoyed every minute reading

I run a 5850 for a few days now and am very satisfied with.
It does 354MH7s at 900MHz and 45% fan speed with cgminer ... I did not try to over- or undervolt it yet.

Hi all

I am a software developer / computer hobbyist from Switzerland ... p2pool mining since April

Just started a little experiment:
after increasing my hash rate to 1GH/s I decided do direct about 40% to two centralized PPS pools for a week or 2. There is an ongoing debate about bad performance of p2pool compared to pps ... I want my own answer comparing the earnings between different pools.

... my interest in the technical problems supersedes my greed for big money 

cheers and have fun in the forum !