Using poclbm With The phatk Kernel

[fpgaminer]

I have had a lot of trouble with phoenix. The biggest issue being that it oftens gets stuck on "[0 Khash/sec] blah blah" and never reconnects to the server. This is especially bad when I have torrents running, even when I limit torrent traffic. The only reason I put up with it is because phoenix supports the phatk kernel, which gets me an extra 20MH/s per card.

Well, I got tired of it, so I forked poclbm and hacked it to support phatk. Here's my fork:

https://github.com/progranism/poclbm

So far so good, poclbm is happily running without any issues whereas my phoenix instances are freezing up  MH/s is about the same. 339 MH/s instead of the 340 MH/s I get on phoenix. Close enough.

Lemme know if this helps anyone else. 

[Clipse]

sweet, will testdrive it

[spiccioli]

I have had a lot of trouble with phoenix. The biggest issue being that it oftens gets stuck on "[0 Khash/sec] blah blah" and never reconnects to the server. This is especially bad when I have torrents running, even when I limit torrent traffic. The only reason I put up with it is because phoenix supports the phatk kernel, which gets me an extra 20MH/s per card.

Well, I got tired of it, so I forked poclbm and hacked it to support phatk. Here's my fork:

https://github.com/progranism/poclbm

So far so good, poclbm is happily running without any issues whereas my phoenix instances are freezing up  MH/s is about the same. 339 MH/s instead of the 340 MH/s I get on phoenix. Close enough.

Lemme know if this helps anyone else. 

Thanks so much, I have the very same issue with phoenix getting stuck and making me lose hours of mining (even running several copies for each gpu is not enough since all one of them can hang if left running long enough).

I'm going to test this right now.

spiccioli.

[fpgaminer]

Let me know if it works okay. I've been running it since I posted and so far none of the instances have failed. However I haven't measured stale share ratio yet; I was getting 0.1% with the old version of phoenix I had which was very nice.

[fsasa70]

Super noobie question here...

How do I make this work? Do I just drag and drop to the poclbm folder?

Because am seeing no difference when I drag and drop the phatk files...

[huayra.agera]

This is interesting and yeah, how do we make this work? A simple guide maybe? Thanks!

[spiccioli]

Let me know if it works okay. I've been running it since I posted and so far none of the instances have failed. However I haven't measured stale share ratio yet; I was getting 0.1% with the old version of phoenix I had which was very nice.

Sadly it causes a kernel trap after a few minutes of work, I'm using it onto a LinuxCoin pc with two 5850s which has been working ok with phoenix (apart from the hang problem) for more than three weeks.

And when it traps I have to power-cycle the pc. 

best regards.

spiccioli.

[Sukrim]

I'm already thinking of killing + restarting phoenix every 10 minutes... would loose me less time than it already has with these lockups!

[gentakin]

Works great for me. I actually had the same idea a few days ago, but was too lazy to actually look into it.
Hashrate is about the same. (Maybe only 283mhash/s instead of 284mhash/s.)

It's also possible to clone fpgaminer's poclbm-phatk git repo, then merge luke-jr's branch for better console output into it. There's 1 conflict that can easily be solved by using luke-jr's version of the code.
edit: What I actually wanted to say is: "[..]merge luke-jr's branch for better connectivity issues handling into it.". Sure, it has better console output, but that was not the reason why I merged his branch. Link is here: http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=19051.0

Thanks!!

[fpgaminer]

Works great for me.

Yay!

It's also possible to clone fpgaminer's poclbm-phatk git repo, then merge luke-jr's branch for better console output into it.

Thank you for checking that! I was going to look into luke-jr's branch as well, so I could get a good figure on the # of stales I'm getting. Since you've confirmed the merge is simple, I'll try doing that soon.

Sadly it causes a kernel trap after a few minutes of work, I'm using it onto a LinuxCoin pc with two 5850s which has been working ok with phoenix (apart from the hang problem) for more than three weeks.

Woah, weird. Have you ever run poclbm on that machine before?

This is interesting and yeah, how do we make this work? A simple guide maybe? Thanks!

Linux or Windows?

On Linux you just:

Code:

git clone git://github.com/progranism/poclbm fpgaminer-poclbm

And then use it like a regular version of poclbm.

For Windows ... well ... I'd have to get PyOpenCL and stuff up and running and see if I can package something together.

[fpgaminer]

Merged in Luke-Jr's work on poclbm. I put it on a different branch in my fork: https://github.com/progranism/poclbm/tree/with-luke-jr-mods

Seems to work just great 

[wahbasah]

+1 for win version

[fsasa70]

+1 for win version

Me too 

[Internet151]

Windows version please!

[fpgaminer]

Alright, here's a stab in the dark for the Windows version:

Binary: http://www.bitcoin-mining.com/poclbm-with-phatk-lukejr-win32-20110620a.zip

Source: http://www.bitcoin-mining.com/poclbm-with-phatk-lukejr-src-20110620a.zip

The source archive includes the code, and a folder called "win32" which is what I used to build the EXE from using py2exe, in case you want to do it yourself or use the python code directly.

Please note: This worked on my Windows 7 64-bit machine, but I only have an nVidia on here so I couldn't do a full test. I also don't have a "clean" Windows machine without Python and other installed dependencies on it, so I don't know if the above zip has all the dependencies packed in. Just let me know if it doesn't work


VirusTotal Results:
http://www.virustotal.com/file-scan/report.html?id=84149252dfa3967569a44afacfc78c912284af1105598fb3eca2e54f12d862df-1308618791
http://www.virustotal.com/file-scan/report.html?id=206672d8d24a35ba4ed9884016f2c802358bd11f4c328dcf529bd2733e14b57c-1308618794

[c_k]

Ah, with Python 2.7 this looks better than Python 3.2 however it also seems to need the PyOpenCL module to run

[huayra.agera]

Hi! I have it now up and running in windows7x64 (I downloaded the binary) and I have about the same hashrate on my 5850 (381 with Phoenix+phatk)960/300/1.174v. No 1 Mhash difference. Haven't had any stales yet. Will be monitoring for the next hours/days.

I hope this gets integrated to the major GUI miners/frontend. This is just great! Thank you for your work!  

[spiccioli]

Sadly it causes a kernel trap after a few minutes of work, I'm using it onto a LinuxCoin pc with two 5850s which has been working ok with phoenix (apart from the hang problem) for more than three weeks.

Woah, weird. Have you ever run poclbm on that machine before?

Hi fpgaminer,

poclbm does not work, it gives an error about access rights and I did not bother to look at it more deeply.

I've made a few more tests with your work and it always freezes or traps after a few minutes of work. The longest run has been less than half an hour.

So I decided to go back to phoenix.

Best regards.

spiccioli.

ps. I'm running a 2x5850s rig with linuxcoin 0.2a as operating system and I start two instances of poclbm, one for each gpu, inside a screen session like this:

DISPLAY=:0 ./poclbm.py -v -d 0 -a 2 --user=... --pass=... -o api.bitcoin.cz --backup=user:pass@useast.btcguild.com:8332

My 5850s are running 885/295 (core/mem) at 1.08V and produce around 350Mh each.

[wahbasah]

works great in win7 32bit
better than phoenix

send you 0.1

[Dominic Sayers]

Working fine in Windows 7 64-bit. I'm getting about the same hash rate, but enjoying luke-jr's improved status messages nonetheless.