New release: v2.11.1, March 7th 2013

Keep building on the changes required for BFL SC when it comes out, adding new features and fixing bugs with the new 2.11 branch... This is still the unstable development version but is proving quite stable for my testing so far.


Human readable changelog:

Faster startup now when pools are slow, connecting to the first pool available!
Fixed some stratum bugs which would lead to weird disconnects when pools were slow.
Improved the mining resume support for stratum.
Added the show message feature of stratum (which I don't believe any pool uses yet?).
Lots of other minor stratum fixes and improvements.
Added the --hotplug (time) feature if you have hardware that has random stalls every time the usb devices are probed (default is 5 seconds).
Extra API features.
Random bugfixes.


Full changelog:

- Shorten the time before keepalive probes are sent out and how frequently
they're sent with stratum curls.
- Only set stratum auth once to prevent multiple threads being started.
- Display select return value on select fail in stratum thread.
- Clear the socket of anything in the receive buffer if we're going to retry
connecting.
- Allow pools to be resuscitated on first startup by the watchpool thread.
- Check all pools simultaneously at startup switching to the first alive one to
speed up startup.
- Clear just the socket buffer when we don't care what is left in a stratum
socket.
- Clear the stratum socket whenever we are closing it since the buffer is going
to be reused.
- Do not continue work from a stratum pool where the connection has been
interrupted.
- Reset stratum_notify flag on suspend_stratum as well.
- Close any sockets opened if we fail to initiate stratum but have opened the
socket.
- Close any existing stratum socket if we are attempting to restart stratum so
the pool knows the connection has gone.
- Show mechanism of stratum interruption if select times out.
- Make stratum connection interrupted message higher priority to be visible at
normal logging levels.
- Implement client.show_message support for stratum.
- API add 'Network Difficulty' to 'coin'
- Setup BFLSC support
- API use control_lock when switching pools
- Make sure to retry only once with noresume support for stratum.
- Instead of keeping track of when the last work item was generated to keep
stratum connections open, keep them open if any shares have been submitted
awaiting a response.
- usbutils.c copy full size to 'Last Command'
- configure - set USE_USBUTILS when usbutils is required and use it in the code
- Clear last pool work on switching pools if the current pool supports local
work generation or we are in failover only mode.
- make rw locks: mining_thr_lock and devices_lock
- Release MMQ device only once (not 4 times)
- api.c fix MSG overlap
- Hotplug - allow setting interval via --hotplug or API
- curses - fix - put a dev_width inside #ifdef
- usb_cleanup() use correct locking mechanism
- Implement and use usb_cleanup() on shutdown or restart
- miner.php report 'Last Valid Work' as time before request
- API - return Last Valid Work
- api -> drv
- ZTX bug set missing drv_id

Yes. What pool and protocol? Some pools have been really struggling of late so it's the likely culprit.

Ahahaha you so funny 

I wouldn't say "guessing". It's great marketing getting people to pay for something in advance where getting it first counts so much, even if it's not likely to be available for another 6 months after you claim.

That optimisation is done on every serious mining software.

I like your style.
Search for "GPU DEVICE ISSUES and use of --gpu-map" in you README poster. I can't tell exactly how to set it up for you without access to your machine but that is where your remaining issues lie I believe.

Theoretically it should work with cgminer as well, but you'd have to have a very permissive http proxy to allow this and there's a catch 22 there in that there's a good chance you're behind a proxy because your network is restrictive.

The only way to use stratum across a proxy is with a socks proxy, which cgminer supports but I'm not aware of anyone using it yet.

You are having multiple problems. Does the 5970 work or are you another hopeful that bought a dead GPU? Most of these are way beyond working status thanks to being abused by miners. Do you have enough system ram to scrypt mine on that many GPUs? Did you read the EXTENSIVE section on using --gpu-map in the readme?

AMD are awesome at breaking stuff. Manually download the AMD APP version 2.7 and install it and try again. You will need to log in/out or even reboot for the modified paths to work.

Downplay its importance by not giving it a full name entry. Subtle... 

CPU speed is close to irrelevant with GPU bitcoin mining. However there is a small but demonstrable benefit to changing CPU frequency governor to high speed with scrypt GPU mining so therefore CPU speed matters slightly. I wouldn't get too excited though, it's only marginally more than a trivial speedup.

Speculators

13.1 is broken shit. Try 12.8

So many stratum bugs have been fixed since then I can't even tell you exactly. I would certainly recommend upgrading to the stable 2.10.5 release.

Second card sold for $365. Third up for sale now.

But long enough.

No, as the maintenance burden isn't worth it.

Because CPU mining with cgminer is deprecated, unsupported, and undeveloped.

I wonder if this has nothing to do with the GPU code since that is actually unchanged (apart from the kernels) and is related to the USB+hotplug code since it's windows only... Kano?