BFGMiner 3.0.0 CPU mining on Ubuntu 12.10 Live USB - Flags? Build vs. PPA?

[lemonys]

I am running Ubuntu Live 12.10 on a series of USB boot pen drives on a *lot* of Dell blade servers. I have access to these blades through friends and do not have to worry about electricity.  The Bootable USB setup was necessary so I could 'pull the plug' on the blades when they were needed by others - not affecting the host OS.

Right now I am using CPUMiner (minerd) and things are working smoothly.  But minerd does not support stratum (as far as I can read).  Is this correct? I have been unable to make it work with stratum servers.

CGminer (with stratum support) replaced minerd, but I am not able to install the Intel OpenCL SDK on the 12.10 Live USB drives...  There is a myriad of problems (running out of drive space, rpm -> deb conversion issues, dependencies, etc...). Without some sort of OpenCL driver for the processors, nothing shows up as being available to CGMiner.

I am looking at BFGMiner now.  I have it working, but it runs noticeable slower than minerd.  I have tried playing with the vectors and worksize flags, etc... and still not having much luck.

First question: Does anyone have some flag suggestions?  I am running dual Intel quad-core Xenon processors on each blade.  BFGMiner shows 16 CPU devices (cores). Do I need to set the threads to 16? It visually shows all the cores running no matter what the thread flag is set to.

Second question: Should I try to build\compile the BFGMiner on my ubuntu installation in order to gain performance?  If so, can someone point me toward some basic instructions on how to do this? I have not compiled on *nix before. I can git the files from github, but am a little lost after that.

Oh, and please don't lecture about how I'm 'wasting time' on CPU mining, etc...  I am using what I have available to me, and I am getting over 1 GH/s combined using just a few USB thumb drives I had lying around. I understand the magnitude of difference there is between CPUs vs GPUs s ASICs. I am doing this to teach myself about *nix and BTC mining... and if I can make a few bucks at the same time, then so be it.

Thanks in advance.

[brodo420]

I like your problem and hope you solve it. I'll try to help where I can. I have a similar situation where I could use usb sticks.  And for me, I would stick with cgminer. You stated diskspace, I take it the thumbs are 4GBish?

Some questions so I don't offer ideas that you've tried already...
* confirm - live not an installed 12.10 on the usb, correct?
* if yes, have you attempted to install on the usb vs live - and then from there, it would have to be a limited install if you are using small sticks; compiling issues are over at that point.

I would like to see you get it working and I want to get it working with cgminer. I actually just gparted a 16G stick last night to prep for xubuntu install for shits n giggles (will run on a 2x7870 box). I want to get this working with CPU mining like yourself for the servers I have access to.

Any effort towards mining is not wasting effort from my perspective, BOL to you!

[lemonys]

Thanks for your reply.  Yes, I am using the 'Live' xubuntu version on the sticks.  Yes, they are 4GB sticks - with 1.5GB of write-able space in theory.

I was never able to get a stratum miner running on the sticks with an success, so I went to the "proxy" route.  I am running mining_proxy.exe on a windows box in my office and have all the xubuntu sticks point to the proxy.  So far it is handling them all without problems.

One thing I did not try was to use a larger stick, convert\install all the OpenCL\SDK software that I needed, then delete the install packages and temp files, and then copy it back to a 4GB stick again.

One interesting bit of learning I did was using "USB Image Tool".  This is a small, simple utility for copying USB boot drives from one stick to another.  No messing with partitions and file systems. It dosen't matter the USB size or existing format, it just creates a copy of the source and 'restores' it to the destination.  Works perfectly every time.

http://www.alexpage.de/usb-image-tool/