python OpenCL bitcoin miner

[LobsterMan]

I made a bit of a discovery when testing m0m's latest binaries in -testnet, look at the times when blocks are generated in the miners, and note that they don't all show up in bitcoin's UI:



There seems to be a delay of 1 or more minutes between when they show up in the miner and when bitcoin picks up the transaction, if it picks it up at all.
Is this something to worry about, or just a peculiarity of testnet?

[Remote]

it's actually all said in this thread, you just have to read it.

1. download (getwork patched client) bitcoin-getwork-* and the miner poclbm_py2exe_*.


2. make sure, you got a bitcoin.conf file at
C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin\bitcoin.conf
(or on xp)
C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Bitcoin\bitcoin.conf

containing

Code:

rpcuser=someone
rpcpassword=secret

3.a start bitcoin -server and wait for connections to get the last block
3.b start poclbm --user=someone --pass=secret
if you only have one GPU, this is it, if there's more, you'd need to specify the device to use for the miner, but it will tell you.
if you don't know how to handle your commandline, just create
a bitcoin.bat containing

Code:

start /DC:\Users\[username]\Desktop\bitcoin bitcoin.exe -server

and a poclbm.bat containing

Code:

start /DC:\Users\[username]\Desktop\poclbm poclbm.exe --user=someone --pass=secret

to feed your clicking-needs.


4. wait and/or pray

Thanks for the guide, although it looks like you left something out. When I start the miner I get the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "poclbm.py", line 5, in <module>
  File "pyopencl\__init__.pyc", line 3, in <module>
  File "pyopencl\_cl.pyc", line 12, in <module>
  File "pyopencl\_cl.pyc", line 10, in __load
ImportError: DLL load failed: The specified procedure could not be found.

Edit: Please post links if something needs to be downloaded.

I'm on Windows 7 64bit and have a NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS (with "OpenCL 1.0 CUDA 3.1.1 - CU: 12 @ 1188MHz (GPU)").

Nobody that can help me? I'm about to give up on running Bitcoins since I could use my CPU for other things, but I would like to use my GPU while I'm doing those other things. Please take a moment and explain how to fix this error.

[BitLex]

i'm not sure about that error,
but do you have latest devdriver and cudatoolkit installed on your machine?

[AHZ]

I made a bit of a discovery when testing m0m's latest binaries in -testnet, look at the times when blocks are generated in the miners, and note that they don't all show up in bitcoin's UI:
...
There seems to be a delay of 1 or more minutes between when they show up in the miner and when bitcoin picks up the transaction, if it picks it up at all.
Is this something to worry about, or just a peculiarity of testnet?

I had 2 such events with bitcoin-getwork-svn173-win32 in a real network
the miner had the event, but bitcoin did not catch it at all.
I still do not know what happened there and how to to trace it

[BitLex]

that's just one of those ~10% "lost blocks",
your miner finds one, your client checks the network, network tells your client it's to late.

within the last weeks i'v been able to "find" 50hashes, only 45 of them have been accepted/shown up in the client-gui/generating coins.
get used to it.

[LobsterMan]

I made a bit of a discovery when testing m0m's latest binaries in -testnet, look at the times when blocks are generated in the miners, and note that they don't all show up in bitcoin's UI:

There seems to be a delay of 1 or more minutes between when they show up in the miner and when bitcoin picks up the transaction, if it picks it up at all.
Is this something to worry about, or just a peculiarity of testnet?

When they show up in the command window, they have zero confirmations. They do not show in the bitcoin UI until they have one confirmation. That delay can be a minute or 10. It is not a bug.

I don't think that is true...some of my blocks have shown up immediately with "0 confirmations" as soon as the miner locates them.

that's just one of those ~10% "lost blocks",
your miner finds one, your client checks the network, network tells your client it's to late.

within the last weeks i'v been able to "find" 50hashes, only 45 of them have been accepted/shown up in the client-gui/generating coins.
get used to it.

That's....not cool 

[BitLex]

That's....not cool

but that's how it is, you can't always win the race.
if your CPU/regular-miner does this, you wouldn't even notice/care, except when checking your debug.log.

[m0mchil]

updated to SVN 186

[laanwj]

updated to SVN 186

Applies cleanly, thanks

[satoshi]

updated to SVN 186

Thanks m0mchil for keeping up on the updates!

GPU miners, please upgrade as soon as possible to shut down the free transaction abuse!  This version has the new priority-based limit on free transaction spam.

Just updated to SVN 181 and fixed getwork patch to wait 60 seconds between rebuilding the block with new transactions. This is actually the behavior of the original client, was forgotten in the patch by mistake.  Fixes heavy CPU usage on every getwork request (this became obvious with recent heavy transaction spam). Please upgrade.

Before SVN 184, compiling transactions into a block used an n^2 algorithm.  The new efficient single-pass algorithm is orders of magnitude quicker.  (O(n) vs O(n^2)/2 algorithm, n=200 maybe 10 to 100 times quicker)

[slush]

Hi m0mchil, firstly thank you for your work. Is there any way to include getwork patch into official client? I'm using bitcoin on old centos server and compiling is pain here!

[satoshi]

A revised version of getwork is now in the official client, but the miners need to be updated a little to use it.

[m0mchil]

Thank you satoshi, it is a small fix, I hope it will be ready tomorrow.

[m0mchil]

Updated the miner to work with official bitcoin SVN 189.

[SmokeTooMuch]

poclbm_py2exe_20101125 doesnt work for me
(Bitcoin 0.3.17 official @ win7 64)

sharound(..........) errors

[BitLex]

works fine for me with 0.3.17 on both, winXP&7 64.

[neptop]

poclbm_py2exe_20101125 doesnt work for me
(Bitcoin 0.3.17 official @ win7 64)

sharound(..........) errors

Same here. Got an ATI card and latest (10.11) drivers. Also Win7 64.

Code:

error: function
          "amd_bitalign" declared implicitly
        sharound(D,E,F,G,H,A,B,C,R(37),0x766A0ABB);
        ^

[m0mchil]

Fixed.

[LobsterMan]

New version works very nicely, except if I try to add -v to my launch options on an nvidia gtx275



It crashes shortly thereafter

Code:

Faulting application name: poclbm.exe, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x4918019b
Faulting module name: nvcuda.dll, version: 8.17.12.6099, time stamp: 0x4cb9d8c5
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x000285d5
Faulting process id: 0x480
Faulting application start time: 0x01cb8d411389c8bb
Faulting application path: C:\Users\[user]\Desktop\poclbm_py2exe_20101126\poclbm.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Windows\system32\nvcuda.dll
Report Id: 5a9d2442-f934-11df-8ff5-0026185aa540

[brocktice]

Thanks for the updates, m0mchil, and for integrating getwork into the mainline client, Satoshi!  I've also updated my minerd.py to incorporate m0mchil's latest changes, and I've tested it in the testnet and verified that it finds blocks appropriately with the svn r191.