NEW VERSION 2.5.0, JULY 7 2012

Working on a big update to improve Mini Rig (and FPGA performance in general), but it's not quite done yet, so it'll need to wait for 2.6.0. Better Puppet Master integration is also still in the works.

In the meantime, I've incorporated most of the changes from CGMiner 2.5.0, except for Con's "workaround" which discards valid shares from BFL devices in order to avoid stales. On average, the shares discarded are about the same as the stales avoided, so the effective difference here is that CGMiner lies about them while BFGMiner reports them honestly. I'll publish some Utility comparison statistics between the two in a few days regardless of which performs better.

Human readable changelog:

• Partial support for use of BFL Mini Rigs on p2pool through use of the --bfl-range option, provided you have a new enough minirig that supports the nonce-range feature. By default this feature is disabled because it costs ~1% in hashrate, but given the massive loss of hashes you would otherwise have mining on p2pool, this is worth using. Other miners should leave it disabled.
• Huge update to other bitforce device. I've merged all of p_shep's changes into this code (thanks!). These can reenable devices, time out gracefully and mark them sick/overheated and so on.
• Fixed the dynamic GPU intensity behaviour which was getting stuck at -10 on faster GPUs.
• Updated API code with lots of changes under the hood courtesy of Kano, and updated miner.php.

Full changelog

• Fix BitFORCE driver to not silenty discard valid shares (bug introduced by CGMiner merges)
• Fix --benchmark not working since the dynamic addition of pools and pool stats.
• Make disabling BFL nonce range support a warning since it has to be explicitly enabled on the command line now.
• miner.php allow renaming table headers
• Make bitforce nonce range support a command line option --bfl-range since enabling it decrease hashrate by 1%.
• Add sanity checking to make sure we don't make sleep_ms less than 0 in bitforce.
• The fastest minirig devices need a significantly smaller starting sleep time.
• Use a much shorter initial sleep time to account for faster devices and nonce range working, and increase it if nonce range fails to work.
• Use nmsleep instead of usleep in bitforce.
• Provide a ms based sleep function that uses nanosleep to avoid the inaccuracy of usleep on SMP systems.
• delay_time_ms is always set so need not be initialised in bitforce.
• Increase bitforce timeout to 10 seconds.
• Add more hysteresis and poll ~5 times to allow for timer delays in bitforce devices.
• miner.php allow alternating line colours (off by default)
• Display the actual duration of wait when it is greater than the cutoff.
• Set nonce to maximum once we determine nonce range support is broken.
• Initial wait time is always known so no need to zero it beforehand in bitforce.
• No point counting wait time until the work is actually sent to bitforce devices.
• Use string comparison functions instead of explicit comparisons.
• Account for wait_ms time when nonce_range is in use on BFL.
• Split nonces up into 1/5 chunks when nonce range is supported.
• limit clear buffer iterations.
• Ad fd check to clear buffer.
• miner.php remove incorrect 'DATE' error message
• miner.php allow summary header in custom pages
• Disable nonce range support in BFL when broken support is detected.
• Restart_wait is only called with a ms value so incorporate that into the function.
• Only try to adjust dev width when curses is built in.
• miner.php define custom sum fields as a simple array
• Fix off-by-one error in nonce increment in bfl.
• Use BE when setting nonce in bitforce nonce range work.
• Enable nonce range in the normal init sequence for bfl.
• Queue extra work at 2/3 differently depending on whether we're using nonce range or not.
• Initially enable support for nonce range support on bfl, splitting nonces up into 3/4 size and only disable it if it fails on work submit.
• Attempt to detect nonce range support in BFL by sending work requring its support.
• Limit retrying on busy for up to BITFORCE_TIMEOUT_MS
• Attempt to initialise while bitforce device returns BUSY.
• Extend length of string that can be passed to BFL devices.
• Fix signedness warning.
• Adjust device width column to be consistent.
• Use cgpu-> not gpus[] in watchdog thread.
• Add api stats (sleep time)
• Timing tweaks Added long and short timeouts, short for detecting throttling, long to give up totally. Reset sleep time when device re-initialised Still check results after timeout Back up a larger time if result on first poll.
• Add API Notify counter 'Comms Error'
• Style police on api.c
• Do all logging outside of the bitforce mutex locking to avoid deadlocks.
• Remove applog call from bfwrite to prevent grabbing nested mutexes.
• Bitforce style changes.
• Minor style changes.
• Remove needless roundl define.
• Made JSON error message verbose.
• Fine-tune timing adjustment. Also remove old work_restart timing.
• Check for gpu return times of >= 0, not just 0, to fix intensity dropping to -10.
• Restart is zeroed in the mining thread so no need to do it inside the bitforce code.
• More improvements to comms. BFL return nothing when throttling, so should not be considered an error. Instead repeat with a longer delay.
• Polling every 10ms there's not much point checking the pthread_cond_timedwait as it just adds overhead. Simply check the value of work_restart in the bfl main polling loop.
• Use a pthread conditional that is broadcast whenever work restarts are required. Create a generic wait function waiting a specified time on that conditional that returns if the condition is met or a specified time passed to it has elapsed. Use this to do smarter polling in bitforce to abort work, queue more work, and check for results to minimise time spent working needlessly.
• Add busy time to wait time.
• api.c put version up to 1.14
• Add tiny delay after writing to BFL Change BFL errors to something more human readable Send work busy re-tries after 10ms delay
• Fix race condition in thread creation that could under some conditions crash BFGMiner at startup

About 253 according to https://github.com/progranism/Open-Source-FPGA-Bitcoin-Miner/blob/master/projects/X6000_ztex_comm4/hdl/fpgaminer_top.v#L155

Note it's probably not the exact same bitstream.

Quick update before I get ready for bed... I have made significant progress tonight, and now have a firmware that will successfully mine. Keep in mind this code is still at a fairly early stage of development, and probably still less reliable than stcupp's firmware. One bonus, however, is that it also has a command-line interface you can access with PuTTY (it supports serial terminals) or GNU Screen (sudo screen /dev/ttyACM0); you can use this interface to dump specs on your ModMiner and play around with the JTAG directly (other developers: please don't try to use this as an interface for implementing mining! it's not a stable protocol, and I'll be providing a new one just for that soon). Note that the CLI cannot be used at the same time as a miner. This does not support bitstream uploading, so to make it work for mining, you will need to at the very least use stcupp's firmware to upload the bitstream first (and not remove power afterward - use the reset button!).

Here is the binary firmware file
Here is the source code

Edit: Also note this doesn't have any support for the temp sensors

Then the Bitcoin community would need to approve of this change with a large majority choosing to switch. However, the only reason to do so would be if 1) the ASIC miner were compromising the security of Bitcoin (not going to happen with BFL distributing these diversely), or 2) big-investment GPU miners make up enough FUD to scare people (so their income isn't compromised). So far, most of the panic seems to be #2, though I don't see what the GPU miners really hope to accomplish considering the subsidy halving will make them unprofitable either way.

Technically speaking, if one wants to be un-nice to the Bitcoin network, you could setup 3-addresses for a regular Bitcoin miner...

(Reposted from here)

Looks like Con's solution to his perceived problem of "BFL actually supports CGMiner pretty well, via the original developer of FPGA support and BFL driver - but that's not via me" is to get rid of me so they're left forced to give him stuff or not be supported. In effect, Con has decided that CGMiner will become/live on (how long?) as a de facto hostile fork of BFGMiner (which has continuity of maintenance). I'm disappointed Con has chosen to severe cooperation between CGMiner and BFGMiner, but I hope to continue pulling as many improvements from CGMiner as possible (Con hinted earlier tonight that he wasn't planning to accept the device API updates needed for better Mini Rig functionality - including p2pool compatibility - so there's an increased risk some changes might become impractical)

P.S. I won't speak for BFL, but they asked me to do the Mini Rig improvements for BFGMiner originally (I was doing the CGMiner backport mainly because it was possible). Hopefully this will finally be ready this week (waiting on BFL for some last things), and I expect to release a version of BFGMiner using it ASAP.

Well, nobody supports ancient versions of CGMiner. First thing to do is upgrade to BFGMiner 2.4.4 - or at least CGMiner 2.4.4 (but note future versions will likely have serious regressions in BFL support). Inevitably though, it sounds like there's a problem with your modem: software shouldn't be able to crash it no matter what they do.

Correction: I didn't reject it, I found it didn't work and started to explain why not - and he rudely dismissed the possibility there was anything wrong with it (though he later decided to fix some of the more obvious issues).

Looks like Con's solution to his perceived problem of "BFL actually supports CGMiner pretty well, via the original developer of FPGA support and BFL driver - but that's not via me" is to get rid of me so they're left forced to give him stuff or not be supported. In effect, Con has decided that CGMiner will become/live on (how long?) as a de facto hostile fork of BFGMiner (which has continuity of maintenance). I'm disappointed Con has chosen to severe cooperation between CGMiner and BFGMiner, but I hope to continue pulling as many improvements from CGMiner as possible (Con hinted earlier tonight that he wasn't planning to accept the device API updates needed for better Mini Rig functionality - including p2pool compatibility - so there's an increased risk some changes might become impractical)

P.S. I won't speak for BFL, but they asked me to do the Mini Rig improvements for BFGMiner originally (I was doing the CGMiner backport mainly because it was possible). Hopefully this will finally be ready this week (waiting on BFL for some last things), and I expect to release a version of BFGMiner using it ASAP.

No, it says the last time was prior to 2.6.29.

AFAIK this bug affects all versions of Linux presently...

This is the Linux leapsecond bug. To fix it, either reboot or run (with proper permissions):

So what GPL-compatible license is the relevant source code available under, and which file(s) are that "relevant source code"?

Hey, don't quote out of context! If it's incorrect, how about answering his reasoning too?

Quick update from me... today I completed getting a basic firmware running complete with LED flashing and (very simple) command line interface. I also began writing the JTAG driver to talk to the FPGA(s): you can see my current draft of this here. The good news (or at least, interesting to me) is that this is looking like it might even be possible to chain multiple FPGAs (or even other devices) on each socket in the future, but I suppose that depends a lot on what hardware cablepair plans.

Also wanted to drop a note of thanks to TheSeven for helping me reverse engineer some of the pinouts last week. Anyone interested in keeping up with the latest on this free firmware in real time is welcome to join us on Freenode's #BTCFPGA channel.

I probably shouldn't give his lies a response, but...

Here Kano is going just based on raw stale count. He should knew pretty well that the hack he's talking about actually hides most of these, rather than preventing them. The proper solution can actually prevent them.

The truth is, I implemented LP support for Icarus in CGMiner. Anyone can see this in: 34f8641 Icarus: Abandon a scanhash early when work restart requested

FWIW, while Kano didn't introduce longpoll support, he has contributed a bit to the Icarus driver:

• Cosmetics: Change "PGA" to "ICA" and add himself to copyright header
• REMOVED epoll support (CGMiner performs worse than BFGMiner on Linux, because of this)
• Improve detection time with faster "golden nonce"
• REMOVED workaround for Icarus USB-UART dropping communication on some systems (because of this, CGMiner will not work with Icarus for more than a few hours on my system or anyone else affected by the hardware issue)
• --icarus-timing and automatic hashrate detection (this was an excellent improvement)
• General FPGA avoiding of harmless serial port open failures

It's important to note if you just look at the commit log that Kano reverted a number of my improvements in 80f4fbbdebb4a1c8cf356c2334cb73cd01925eed, and later added them back himself. Other additions, like fixing the MH/s display, I spent hours debugging to find the problem and fix for it, and Kano ripped it off without properly attributing me.

No, I told you to fix the bug you introduced with it. When you refused, I fixed it for you, and the actual improvement you made was merged - note that I even made sure to attribute you properly.

Unfortunately, it doesn't achieve nearly the same end result, and the minimal results it does get really don't justify the time (IMO) it would take to make something generally usable of it - obviously spending the time finishing up the protocol update (now limited to Mini Rigs) and getting Windows auto-detect are better uses

I wouldn't worry about Kano's trolling - he's taking a lot of things out of context and combining with outright lies to basically throw a fit. Ironically, I don't even remember what his original reason for throwing a fit this time was anymore

I wasn't referring to that specific point with regard to him being a liar, though even there he took things out of context...

My "private code" doesn't really increase performance, just avoids stales in a very hacky way. It doesn't make a big enough difference that I bother making an effort to add it in locally anymore. Part of the protocol updates for MiniRig should also provide a proper working mostly-solution. Adding the workaround to BFGMiner proper (or CGMiner) would require a few hours to try to clean it up, add a new option to enable it (--hacky-bitforce-workaround or something; note it doesn't work without causing other problems so simply enabling it all the time isn't reasonable), etc - which seems to me to be wasted effort when there's a proper mostly-solution right around the corner. Another important point Kano neglected to mention was that I also told him I would be more than happy to accept a cleaned up version of this workaround from him if he wanted to spend the time doing so; he told me he wasn't interested unless Con gave him complete control over the BFL driver.

NEW VERSION - 2.4.4, JULY 1 2012

Mostly the same changes as CGMiner this time. Additionally, I fixed a crash in the Icarus driver; thanks to wildemagic for reporting it!

Still waiting on BFL to finish the revised Mini Rig protocol update code.

Improved compatibility with P4man's Puppet Master is planned for a future release too.

Human readable changelog:

• Massive overhaul of the nrolltime mechanism now should cause a huge rise in efficiency on pools that support it. This allows much lower getwork bandwidth for much higher hashrates.
• Support for the expire= feature. This works in concert with nrolltime when pools support it to allow more local generation of work.
• Support for the x-mining-hashrate feature. I'm sure some pool somewhere cares about this, even though I'm not convinced, but it was trivial to add.
• Better damping of GPU temperature changes should cause much less overshoot when temps rise or fall outside the optimal range in autofan mode.
• Reinstated the application restart should adl fail - disabling this did not fix the crashes for those who had cgminer crash after 1 week of uptime in windows fail land when their ATI driver would fail, and disabled the advantage of it fixing the problem for those who simply lost their fanspeed.
• API groups features - this is squarely aimed at grouping privileges for remote access for services like P4man's hopping puppetmaster service.
• Support for unlimited devices
• Support for unlimited pools
• Massive fix for the "dynamic" feature for GPUs. Somehow in the many device abstractions it had gotten broken and wasn't really doing what it was intended. It should be much more dynamic now.
• FPGA fixes.
• Fixes for builds on other platforms.
• Lots of other things under the hood.

Full changelog

• Fix builds on non gnu platforms.
• api.c ensure old mode is always available when not using --api-groups + quit() on param errors
• Implement rudimentary X-Mining-Hashrate support.
• Detect large swings in temperature when below the target temperature range and change fan by amounts dependant on the value of tdiff.
• Adjust the fanspeed by the magnitude of the temperature difference when in the optimal range.
• Revert "Restarting cgminer from within after ADL has been corrupted only leads to a crash. Display a warning only and disable fanspeed monitoring."
• api.c fix json already closed
• implement and document API option --api-groups
• Put upper bounds to under 2 hours that work can be rolled into the future for bitcoind will deem it invalid beyond that.
• define API option --api-groups
• api.c allow unwell devices to be enabled so they can be cured
• miner.php - fix/enable autorefresh for custom pages
• miner.php allow custom summary pages - new 'Mobile' summary
• Work around pools that advertise very low expire= time inappropriately as this leads to many false positives for stale shares detected.
• Only show ztex board count if any exist.
• There is no need for work to be a union in struct workio_cmd
• fpgautils.c include a debug message for all unknown open errors
• Don't keep rolling work right up to the expire= cut off. Use 2/3 of the time between the scantime and the expiry as cutoff for reusing work.
• Log a specific error when serial opens fail due to lack of user permissions
• Increase GPU timing resolution to microsecond and add sanity check to ensure times are positive.
• Opencl code may start executing before the clfinish order is given to it so get the start timing used for dynamic intensity from before the kernel is queued.
• fpgautils.c - set BAUD rate according to termio spec
• fpgautils.c - linux ordering back to the correct way
• miner.php remove unneeded '.'s
• miner.php add auto refresh options
• miner.php add 'restart' next to 'quit'
• miner.php make fontname/size configurable with myminer.php
• Make the pools array a dynamically allocated array to allow unlimited pools to be added.
• Make the devices array a dynamically allocated array of pointers to allow unlimited devices.
• Dynamic intensity for GPUs should be calculated on a per device basis. Clean up the code to only calculate it if required as well.
• Bugfix: Provide alternative to JSON_ENCODE_ANY for Jansson 1.x
• Use a queueing bool set under control_lock to prevent multiple calls to queue_request racing.
• Use the work clone flag to determine if we should subtract it from the total queued variable and provide a subtract queued function to prevent looping over locked code.
• Don't decrement staged extras count from longpoll work.
• Count longpoll's contribution to the queue.
• Increase queued count before pushing message.
• Test we have enough work queued for pools with and without rolltime capability.
• As work is sorted by age, we can discard the oldest work at regular intervals to keep only 1 of the newest work items per mining thread.
• Roll work again after duplicating it to prevent duplicates on return to the clone function.
• Abstract out work cloning and clone $mining_threads copies whenever a rollable work item is found and return a clone instead.
• api.c display Pool Av in json
• Take into account average getwork delay as a marker of pool communications when considering work stale.
• Work out a rolling average getwork delay stored in pool_stats.
• Getwork delay in stats should include retries for each getwork call.
• Walk through the thread list instead of searching for them when disabling threads for dynamic mode.
• Extend nrolltime to support the expiry= parameter. Do this by turning the rolltime bool into an integer set to the expiry time. If the pool supports rolltime but not expiry= then set the expiry time to the standard scantime.
• When disabling fanspeed monitoring on adl failure, remove any twin GPU association. This could have been leading to hangs on machines with dual GPU cards when ADL failed.
• modminer: Don't delay 2nd+ FPGAs during work restart
• Disable OpenCL code when not available.
• Fix openwrt crashing on regeneratehash() by making check_solve a noop.
• FPGA - allow device detect override without an open failure
• Fix sign warning.
• Bugfix: icarus: properly store/restore info and work end times across longpoll restarts
• Enable modminer for release builds

As the original author of CGMiner support for FPGAs, I intend to continue maintaining the driver(s) including implementing ASIC support as soon as possible.

P.S. Kano is trolling and a liar, just ignore him

You should work on those issues. Would be more productive than posting lies on the forum.