python OpenCL bitcoin miner

[ledskof]

Everything is running great here except when I play a video my computer crashes.  I'm running a Radeon 6970 and as soon as I click on a video (youtube, etc) etc I get a hard lock.  If I turn off poclbm.exe no problems with the videos.  Has anyone had a similar experience?

I have exactly the same issue as you described: a complete freeze of all Windows (running Vista 64bit), not even ctrl-alt-del working anymore. And I suspect everything from Adobe: not only flash player but even opening a PDF in Acrobat Reader causes my system to freeze.

I had an ATI 4870 before which didn't show this problem.

Me too.  I have an ATI HD 6970 in a Windows 7 box.  Even at standard clock speeds, if I bring up a youtube video, the screen freezes and I can no longer toggle keyboard lights. iTunes still plays, but I haven't tested network services or anything yet.  Maybe there is some chance I could RDP into it, but I doubt it.

It's really annoying having to remember what not to do, but oh well.  I'm just waiting for the crashing to finally cause a problem with my 4 x SSD RAID 0.

I'm also finding that SDK v2.1 just isn't happening for me.  I removed all ATI related apps, used Driver Sweeper to clean up the remnants, and then went with the 12.10a hotfix + ATI Stream SDK v2.1.  When I run poclbm.exe, it gives the same error message it gives when the Stream SDK isn't installed at all.

I also tried this on a laptop with an ATI HD 5730 in it.  Same thing with poclbm not recognizing the Stream SDK v2.1.  Am I missing some step to get it working?  v2.3 works just fine for me, it's just that I'm assuming in light of people saying to run 2.1, that I would get more performance out of it.  I'm getting 290mhash/s right now by overclocking it to 920mhz.  Any higher seems to just crash it. I was a little too busy to tweak with it right now, so I haven't messed with the the memory clock or voltage much yet.

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[teknohog]

v2.3 works just fine for me, it's just that I'm assuming in light of people saying to run 2.1, that I would get more performance out of it.

In my experience, 2.2 is the best. 2.1 used to have compilation problems with vectors, and 2.3 is a little slower (on a HD5770). These things really seem to be different for different setups, so there is no reason to follow an arbitrary rumour. Try them all and see what works best for you.

[Cryptoman]

When switching out the SDK, does one just need to copy in the library files, or does PyOpenCL need to be rebuilt?

[ElectricGoat]

Hi,

I don't have a big expensive graphic card, but I wanted to try anyway. For the record, I have a Radeon HD 5450, and I get a little below 11 Mhash/s with the default settings, plus maybe 2 Mhash/s with the i3 CPU (3.7 MHash/s with the CPU only). So, of course, it's not very impressive, and probably not worth mining with.

[tmr0]

You will have to wait.

Probably. But I would try to run it on testnet and see if anything gets accepted. On testnet, you should get a block after several minutes. If it works on testnet, it's just a matter of time (and luck) on "realnet".

Thanks for that tip, I called bitcoin with -testnet and -server and got results accepted fairly quickly.  I suspect something was not right with the way the bash script I wrote was launching poclbm.

[tcatm]

fake-push and logging support: http://pastebin.com/J4qZRgXT

[dishwara]

Hi,

I have nvidia Geforce 9400GT with latest drivers 260.99
I am running poclbm.exe -d0 --host=mining.bitcoin.cz --port=8332 --user=##### --pass=##### & i get around 2300+ khash/s
I tried with -w256 & get same result, If i go for low value i get less khash/s & if i try more than 256, even 257, it runs for 5 seconds & crashes
But i get more than 4000000khash/s that time. Only for 5 seconds.
I saw ati cards have ati stream sdk, which improves a lot to achieve more khash/s.
Is there some way to increase the khash/s of my graphics card.
It has CUDA= 3.2 & opencl=1.0

[robmon]

I was happily mining avg 148 000 khash/s with my 5770 but after reading the original post a little closer and trying the Known best settings I instantly juiced it up to 170 000 khash/s! Important lesson learned, read things thoroughly or don't bother at all.   

Known best settings
(please PM better/best settings for your platform)
Windows 7 64, Stream 2.2, AMD 5[7-8]70
use '-v -w 128' with '-f 30' on 5770 (160 MHash), '-f 5' on 5870 (318 MHash)

[ledskof]

I'm getting about 295M with a 6970.  Anyone doing better with a 6970?

[Cryptoman]

robmon, dial up your core clock to 950 MHz.  I'm getting 185 Mhash/s on a 5770.

[geebus]

I'm having an odd issue, seeing if anyone else has seen it...

On my HD6950 running m0mchill's miner, I get ~300Mhash/s and it runs relatively well until I open any other program that uses video acceleration, at which point, my display freezes. To elaborate, my PC doesn't freeze. I can remote desktop into the box, and likewise view my account activity on Slush's pool and see I'm still submitting shares, but the display itself is frozen. Running puddinpop's rpcminer I see the same situation, but his will eventually crash, driver will reset and I get a nice event viewer log for atiocl.dll crashing.

Running Windows 7 Ultimate x86, Sapphire HD6950 (tried with BIOS mod to 6970 as well) with Catalyst 10.12a and Stream SDK 2.3. This configuration seems the most stable out of all, but still occurs.

I've also tried the following:
Catalyst 10.10 / Stream 2.1
Catalyst 10.12 / Stream 2.2
Catalyst 10.12 / Stream 2.3
Catalyst 10.12a / Stream 2.2
Catalyst 11.1a / Stream 2.3

Issue occurs regardless of driver/stream configuration. I am running HDMI digital out on my card.

I don't know if this is an issue of how the OpenCL miners are handling the calls to atiocl.dll, a digital-out issue, or a driver/stream config issue. Any help would be greatly appreciated though.

[Cryptoman]

Hi geebus.  I suspect this is an OpenCL issue since I see the same behavior on Linux.  Have you tried backing the clocks down?  Others have reported that things are more stable if not overclocking.  I decided to just dedicate some machines to mining.  They tend to be unstable even when browsing flash-enabled web pages.

[m0mchil]

I made some pool related changes - socket timeout is now 5 seconds to avoid solving some jobs more than once. Exception handling should be somewhat better too.

[BitLex]

sad that it still doesn't run both 5970 cores,
i'm still forced to use poclbm_py2exe_20101126 on GPU2 (which runs fine, except it crashes, or just stops working from time to time, at least on the pool).

[tcatm]

http://pastebin.com/v98gWWLc (port of ArtForz's code)

567 Mhash/s on a 5970 @ 725 MHz

[m0mchil]

Updated to use ArtForz kernel. Lowered default 'frames' to 30.

I am seeing biggest improvement on linux, Stream 2.1, 2x5970 - ~5%

Thanks ArtForz, tcatm

[bitcoin2]

On testnet I got only a "invalid or state" error message. Has anybody successfully mined a Block with the new Software?

[m0mchil]

Ok, just confirmed... latest version is good only with 'difficulty = 1'. Working properly only on slush's pool.

Please revert to previous version for mining solo. I'm working on a fix.

[Cablesaurus]

Hello all,

New here to the BC scene, I've everything setup successfully with the pOpenCL miner, but have just 2 questions if anyone could fill me in I wasnt able to find much information on:

1) What exactly is the -w / workspace variable doing? I understand where it's pulling the value from in OpenCL, but how does adjusting this effect the process?
2) I've tuned the -w variable down as best I know how to attempt using BC, (running @ -w 62) so I can try to run this in the background while working. It's using 100% of the CPU. Not a huge problem I just saw someone here mentioning it shouldn't be that high? Any ideas on what might be the cause?

[brocktice]

Ok, just confirmed... latest version is good only with 'difficulty = 1'. Working properly only on slush's pool.

Please revert to previous version for mining solo. I'm working on a fix.

My fork has been reverted.