I started a fork of jgarzik's miner a few months ago. The original goal was to provide an optimized miner for Litecoin, an alternative chain that uses a completely different hashing algorithm from Bitcoin. Over time, however, I have also added a number of new features and bugfixes. You can find a complete list of all important changes in the NEWS file; they include:
- Optimized work handling, resulting in a much better getwork efficiency.
- Support for HTTP and SOCKS proxies.
- Support for many different operating systems and architectures, including big-endian ones. The miner has been reported to build successfully on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and Windows (using mingw).
- Clear --help output. (Please read it before using the miner!)
Now for the reason I'm writing this here.
Starting with version 2.2 of this fork, I have re-included support for Bitcoin mining, writing a new implementation of the hashing algorithm. This implementation is different in that the single
--algo=sha256d option should provide the best performance on all systems.
On K10-based processors (such as the Phenom) this fork is only slightly faster than the old "4way" algorithm, but on all other systems you should notice a significant increase in mining speed. The miner is also capable of using AVX and XOP instructions on CPUs that support them, resulting in an even greater speedup.
Here's a link to the git repository:
https://github.com/pooler/cpuminerUnder the "Downloads" tab you will also find a source tarball and a couple Windows binaries.
I don't know if anybody is still interested in CPU mining. The main reason why I want to maintain this miner is because I enjoy coding; also, I like jgarzik's miner because, unlike many others, it conforms to the
KISS design principle.
Given that CPU mining support has been discontinued for cgminer, I hope that people will find this fork useful.
For what is worth, I use your CPU miner, mainly for scrypt, but sometimes for SHA-256 too. I don't care that if it isn't profitable, not doing it mainly for the money. I wish it had some of the nice features that BFG has like dynamic pool handling, API access, log and share files output, etc. I'm actually trying to compile BFGminer with CPU option even though I haven't use C in 20+ years. That's how much I like the idea :-).
FM
