OFFICIAL CGMINER mining software thread for linux/win/osx/mips/arm/r-pi 4.11.1

[kano]

Yes A: is a 1diff share difficulty counter
If you are mining on a pool at 16 diff, each pool share accepted will be 16 x 1diff
If you are mining BTC solo then you are mining (currently) at 112,628,548.66635 diff - so each block you find will increment A by that (until the next diff change)
In the API this is "Difficulty Accepted"
Since pools can change your difficulty, it makes no sense to report shares as a counter of number of shares.
If you want that, it's in the API as "Accepted"
If you want to know how many blocks you found then that's in the API as "Found Blocks"
It's certainly no bug ... as has been stated here before ... it's by design and will stay that way.

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[kentt]

100% CPU problem.  I'm using Xubuntu 12.04, scrypt mining with 6x7950s cgminer 3.4.2.  The causes the rig to lock up after a few hours.
top gives me

Code:

top - 01:59:25 up 11 min,  3 users,  load average: 9.02, 8.21, 4.75
Tasks: 149 total,   2 running, 147 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 50.0%us, 50.0%sy,  0.0%ni,  0.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:  24642564k total,  1488724k used, 23153840k free,    26608k buffers
Swap:  4882428k total,        0k used,  4882428k free,   246960k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                                                                                            
 1791 xxx  20   0 1485m 119m  56m S   92  0.5  10:16.21 cgminer                                                                                            
   10 root      20   0     0    0    0 S   54  0.0   6:06.87 ksoftirqd/1                                                                                        
    3 root      20   0     0    0    0 R   54  0.0   5:56.12 ksoftirqd/0  

Code:

$ cat /proc/interrupts
           CPU0       CPU1       
  0:         47          0   IO-APIC-edge      timer
  1:          1          2   IO-APIC-edge      i8042
  8:          0          1   IO-APIC-edge      rtc0
  9:          0          0   IO-APIC-fasteoi   acpi
 12:          4          0   IO-APIC-edge      i8042
 16:         13         15   IO-APIC-fasteoi   ehci_hcd:usb1
 23:         29          3   IO-APIC-fasteoi   ehci_hcd:usb2
 42:       6807        208   PCI-MSI-edge      ahci
 43:          0          0   PCI-MSI-edge      xhci_hcd
 44:       9506         12   PCI-MSI-edge      eth0
 45:         14          0   PCI-MSI-edge      mei
 46:        508          1   PCI-MSI-edge      snd_hda_intel
 48:       1843          0   PCI-MSI-edge      fglrx[0]@PCI:1:0:0
 49:       1949          0   PCI-MSI-edge      fglrx[1]@PCI:2:0:0
 50:       1968          3   PCI-MSI-edge      fglrx[2]@PCI:4:0:0
 51:       1798          4   PCI-MSI-edge      fglrx[3]@PCI:5:0:0
 52:       2085          1   PCI-MSI-edge      fglrx[4]@PCI:6:0:0
 53:       2098          1   PCI-MSI-edge      fglrx[5]@PCI:7:0:0
NMI:        616        612   Non-maskable interrupts
LOC:      26042      58249   Local timer interrupts
SPU:          0          0   Spurious interrupts
PMI:        616        612   Performance monitoring interrupts
IWI:          0          0   IRQ work interrupts
RES:      23149      17583   Rescheduling interrupts
CAL:        270        201   Function call interrupts
TLB:       1521       9791   TLB shootdowns
TRM:          0          0   Thermal event interrupts
THR:          0          0   Threshold APIC interrupts
MCE:          0          0   Machine check exceptions
MCP:          3          3   Machine check polls
ERR:          0
MIS:    

Any ideas as to how to get the CPU load down.

[kentt]

Running 3.4.3 but notice now (it seems this issue goes back a few versions) that the accepted blocks field now shows the latest difficulty (x number of blocks found it seems) instead of total block count? Anyone got a fix for this?

Not sure what coin you're mining, but on the bitcoin network, cgminer now shows the number of "diff 1 shares" found for the accepted field.  So, if you're pool has a higher share difficulty, the counter will increase by whatever the difficulty of the associated job was each time a share is found.

That's not a bug.  If you really want the number of actual shares found (even though they are not as useful in a world that is moving towards variable difficulty mining), you can get them from the API.

I would like to point out that there is A BUG ASSOCIATED WITH THAT FEATURE.
And that is, that as soon as the "Number of accepted Shares" reaches 10 Million, CGMiner crashes/stops working. I mine on an LTC-Pool with high difficulty and I have to restart CGMiner on a regular basis to make sure the miner just doesn't stop working because it has reached 10 Million diff 1 shares again.

Is there an "official" way to report bugs or is ckolivas going to read this?

Not totally a solution, but zero the stats would be easier than restarting.

[The00Dustin]

mwsock.dll ... hmm I wonder how many times that's been reported in here ... and your not running the latest version

I have now updated to 3.4.3. I just searched through this thread and didn't seem to find any solutions for fixing the mwsock.dll issue. Any thoughts?

Unfortunately we have no solution for a microsoft provided dll crashing. It should not be possible for our software to crash the dll unless there's a bug in the dll. The only suggestions are checking you have the latest dll and there are no virus/trojans that have attached to it.

Not that I think the cgminer devs should in any way be responsible for taking this action, but it is possible to open a ticket with Microsoft.  I don't believe per incident support is actually as expensive as one would expect, and I think the fee is refunded when a problem is proved to be a problem in their OS.  Getting high enough up the chain on the ticket might be tricky and might require reproducing the issue over and over again, so it could be easier for a dev, but I just thought I'd point out that it's more of an option than anyone might realize.  However, I don't use cgminer with Windows (I don't even have Win7 at home), so I can't really offer to help beyond the suggestion in this case, so this is just information for those more vested (either because they are effected or because someone offers them a donation for taking action).

[Askit2]

100% CPU problem.  I'm using Xubuntu 12.04, scrypt mining with 6x7950s cgminer 3.4.2.  The causes the rig to lock up after a few hours.
top gives me

Code:

top - 01:59:25 up 11 min,  3 users,  load average: 9.02, 8.21, 4.75
Tasks: 149 total,   2 running, 147 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 50.0%us, 50.0%sy,  0.0%ni,  0.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:  24642564k total,  1488724k used, 23153840k free,    26608k buffers
Swap:  4882428k total,        0k used,  4882428k free,   246960k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                                                                                            
 1791 xxx  20   0 1485m 119m  56m S   92  0.5  10:16.21 cgminer                                                                                            
   10 root      20   0     0    0    0 S   54  0.0   6:06.87 ksoftirqd/1                                                                                        
    3 root      20   0     0    0    0 R   54  0.0   5:56.12 ksoftirqd/0  

Code:

$ cat /proc/interrupts
           CPU0       CPU1       
  0:         47          0   IO-APIC-edge      timer
  1:          1          2   IO-APIC-edge      i8042
  8:          0          1   IO-APIC-edge      rtc0
  9:          0          0   IO-APIC-fasteoi   acpi
 12:          4          0   IO-APIC-edge      i8042
 16:         13         15   IO-APIC-fasteoi   ehci_hcd:usb1
 23:         29          3   IO-APIC-fasteoi   ehci_hcd:usb2
 42:       6807        208   PCI-MSI-edge      ahci
 43:          0          0   PCI-MSI-edge      xhci_hcd
 44:       9506         12   PCI-MSI-edge      eth0
 45:         14          0   PCI-MSI-edge      mei
 46:        508          1   PCI-MSI-edge      snd_hda_intel
 48:       1843          0   PCI-MSI-edge      fglrx[0]@PCI:1:0:0
 49:       1949          0   PCI-MSI-edge      fglrx[1]@PCI:2:0:0
 50:       1968          3   PCI-MSI-edge      fglrx[2]@PCI:4:0:0
 51:       1798          4   PCI-MSI-edge      fglrx[3]@PCI:5:0:0
 52:       2085          1   PCI-MSI-edge      fglrx[4]@PCI:6:0:0
 53:       2098          1   PCI-MSI-edge      fglrx[5]@PCI:7:0:0
NMI:        616        612   Non-maskable interrupts
LOC:      26042      58249   Local timer interrupts
SPU:          0          0   Spurious interrupts
PMI:        616        612   Performance monitoring interrupts
IWI:          0          0   IRQ work interrupts
RES:      23149      17583   Rescheduling interrupts
CAL:        270        201   Function call interrupts
TLB:       1521       9791   TLB shootdowns
TRM:          0          0   Thermal event interrupts
THR:          0          0   Threshold APIC interrupts
MCE:          0          0   Machine check exceptions
MCP:          3          3   Machine check polls
ERR:          0
MIS:    

Any ideas as to how to get the CPU load down.

When I had that problem or at least a similar problem I was building from GIT while the files where in flux. This happened on a raspberry pi with raspbian not Ubuntu but the high irqd and very high processor seem like that. Any chance you built from GIT?

[-ck]

mwsock.dll ... hmm I wonder how many times that's been reported in here ... and your not running the latest version

I have now updated to 3.4.3. I just searched through this thread and didn't seem to find any solutions for fixing the mwsock.dll issue. Any thoughts?

Unfortunately we have no solution for a microsoft provided dll crashing. It should not be possible for our software to crash the dll unless there's a bug in the dll. The only suggestions are checking you have the latest dll and there are no virus/trojans that have attached to it.

Not that I think the cgminer devs should in any way be responsible for taking this action, but it is possible to open a ticket with Microsoft.  I don't believe per incident support is actually as expensive as one would expect, and I think the fee is refunded when a problem is proved to be a problem in their OS.  Getting high enough up the chain on the ticket might be tricky and might require reproducing the issue over and over again, so it could be easier for a dev, but I just thought I'd point out that it's more of an option than anyone might realize.  However, I don't use cgminer with Windows (I don't even have Win7 at home), so I can't really offer to help beyond the suggestion in this case, so this is just information for those more vested (either because they are effected or because someone offers them a donation for taking action).

Further to this discussion, I've seen quite a few bug reports quite recently about this same dll in combination with firefox. While I do believe the bug is in the dll itself, I wonder if there's a common variable bringing it on? Are those who are having problems with the dll using IPV6 by any chance?

[os2sam]

Are those who are having problems with the dll using IPV6 by any chance?

I've got IPv6 unbound from the network adapter altogether.

[techman05]

Since you've got comments not open on gitHub, I ask here if you notice this . Can in one of the next revisions you have multiple pools set to show thier own best share and accepted list somewhere. Maybe another option button from the selection above mining. I've got my mining set to rotate since eclipseMC is my default and its finding so many block that alot are not being counted and causing the numbers not to add up on the other.

If its just that my rotating is causing the bad numbers maybe a "stop accepting and finish" before rotating or other management strategies if that's not already how it works.

OP, pm me if this option kicks in or already exists.

[martinm]

I'm not sure what the confusion is but ...
DEV
 PGA=0,Name=AMU,ID=0

DEVDETAILS
 DEVDETAILS=0,Name=AMU,ID=0

There is no trick to the association ... Name+ID from one to the other

... except ... missing from DEVS for a GPU, is it has no Name or ID

In miner.php I generate it easily enough:

Code:

function joinsections($sections, $results, $errors)
{
 global $sectionmap;

 // GPU's don't have Name,ID fields - so create them
 foreach ($results as $section => $res)
.
.
.

The names GPU, PGA, ASC in the API are to allow for device selection in the API via a number.
So if you want to affect the first PGA, with a PGA command, it is PGA=0, for the 10th one it is PGA=9
i.e. independent of the screen display - the screen display is Name,ID

I was planning once to also allow selection via the Name,ID but ... as is common I got side tracked ... and since most of the development I do in cgminer is for myself (I get very few donations) I usually do what I feel needs to be done.
I do of course appreciate the donations I get from a few people indeed - but they are not as common for me ... as others

Edit: though of course I get hardware donations and indeed work on the drivers for them as required

Thank you Kano. It's clear now, it was my bad that I assumed something wrong based on previous tests with a GPU and miss-interpretation of a short look of the api.c - File.

[mruiter]

No idea then sorry. Perhaps your Pi is coincidentally failing or as you say, some upgraded other package is responsible.

I was able t get a screen cap of the error when the system locks up



I'm not sure what this error means but I'm leaning towards that there was some kind of disk access error. Perhaps the SD card on my Pi is corrupted?

Just compiled the 3.4.3 this morning. To see if my USB issues with Eruptors where fixed.
I Was very pleased to see everything working without errors at max speed.

But i seem to have te same problem on my Raspberry Pi with Deb Weezy.
It crasheds at random , but Always around 25 minutes or so.

No bad SD, faulty hardware or so. I have three Pi's and all three have the same issue when using cgminer 3.4.3 and bfgminer runs like a charm.
I now, keep using that, but i like cgminer more, stopt using it when the libusb issue came on and i wan't it back

[kentt]

100% CPU problem.  I'm using Xubuntu 12.04, scrypt mining with 6x7950s cgminer 3.4.2.  The causes the rig to lock up after a few hours.
top gives me

Code:

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                                                                                            
 1791 xxx  20   0 1485m 119m  56m S   92  0.5  10:16.21 cgminer                                                                                            
   10 root      20   0     0    0    0 S   54  0.0   6:06.87 ksoftirqd/1                                                                                        
    3 root      20   0     0    0    0 R   54  0.0   5:56.12 ksoftirqd/0  

Any ideas as to how to get the CPU load down.

When I had that problem or at least a similar problem I was building from GIT while the files where in flux. This happened on a raspberry pi with raspbian not Ubuntu but the high irqd and very high processor seem like that. Any chance you built from GIT?

I didn't build from GIT.  I just grabbed the compiled off of http://ck.kolivas.org/apps/cgminer/
I did see your problem and solution a few pages back. Thanks for responding.

[Zanatos666]

Running 3.4.3 but notice now (it seems this issue goes back a few versions) that the accepted blocks field now shows the latest difficulty (x number of blocks found it seems) instead of total block count? Anyone got a fix for this?

Not sure what coin you're mining, but on the bitcoin network, cgminer now shows the number of "diff 1 shares" found for the accepted field.  So, if you're pool has a higher share difficulty, the counter will increase by whatever the difficulty of the associated job was each time a share is found.

That's not a bug.  If you really want the number of actual shares found (even though they are not as useful in a world that is moving towards variable difficulty mining), you can get them from the API.

He appears to be solo mining so there really isnt "accepted" shares.  When he finds a block, his accepted shares are of that of how many coins were in that block.

[mdude77]

mwsock.dll ... hmm I wonder how many times that's been reported in here ... and your not running the latest version

I have now updated to 3.4.3. I just searched through this thread and didn't seem to find any solutions for fixing the mwsock.dll issue. Any thoughts?

Unfortunately we have no solution for a microsoft provided dll crashing. It should not be possible for our software to crash the dll unless there's a bug in the dll. The only suggestions are checking you have the latest dll and there are no virus/trojans that have attached to it.

I've been using windows and troubleshooting windows problems long enough to know that the DLL that "crashed" is regularly not the DLL with the problem.  I think the error reporting mechanism from windows is flawed (imagine that), and it's a routine that's calling winsock that is the problem, not winsock.  Thinking through it, a possible example would be a multithreaded app crashing while one thread is in winsock.  Or it could be winsock crashing when trying to perform a requested call back to the owning app.

I've also seen this type of misleading error message when DLL #1 needs DLL #2.  The error message will state DLL #1 isn't found, and when you look, you'll see DLL #1 is there.  The reality is DLL #1 is looking for DLL #2 and not finding it, but the error message only captures part of the info is gives misleading info.

Overall, I don't believe this is a mswinsock issue.  It's probably not a cgminer issue either, per se, but one of the 3rd party DLLs you are using that is calling mswinsock.

M

[-ck]

Hmm. Thing is, the stratum code is all done raw now, not using any other libraries precisely because I had problems with libcurl and friends. So the code does raw socket calls which directly use winsock calls. So the problem is either in cgminer or the MS dll.

[mdude77]

Hmm. Thing is, the stratum code is all done raw now, not using any other libraries precisely because I had problems with libcurl and friends. So the code does raw socket calls which directly use winsock calls. So the problem is either in cgminer or the MS dll.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I doubt it's the winsock dll.  A lot of programs use that, and if there was a native problem in there, we'd be getting crashes elsewhere from other apps.

Since you code in linux for linux, and port to Windows, what's doing the conversion of your code to what windows uses?  From my experience, problems that make themselves apparent after a period of time indicate a memory leak (a), a multithreaded issue (b), or an unmanaged code issue (c). 

(a) should be apparent by increased memory usage or your internal memory leak testing (which I think I've seen you guys say you have)
(b) is awful to troubleshoot.  such problems are caused by different multithreading problems like race conditions or deadly embraces
(c) is generally code accessing memory regions that it shouldn't be accessing, like exceeding an array boundary

(b) and (c) are particularly troublesome because the problem may not always cause a symptom and the OS might not always detect it and clamp down on the offending app

third party code analyzers are the best way to spot these for complex code.  But if there are third party libraries involved, I doubt the code analyzers would be able to detect such things.

somehow I doubt I'm telling you anything you don't already know though.

M

[-ck]

Hmm. Thing is, the stratum code is all done raw now, not using any other libraries precisely because I had problems with libcurl and friends. So the code does raw socket calls which directly use winsock calls. So the problem is either in cgminer or the MS dll.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I doubt it's the winsock dll.  A lot of programs use that, and if there was a native problem in there, we'd be getting crashes elsewhere from other apps.

Yes a lot use the winsock dll. Note the issue is in mswsock.dll though, and it is actually very rare that applications use raw sockets on windows so I wouldn't say it's quite the same - firefox only recently started using it and lo and behold it's been getting crashes in the same library. Nonetheless, logically my code which is always in heavy development is far more likely to be at fault than an OS provided library (though we've been burnt by that enough already to know it's not impossible). Every attempt so far to get debugging with a full debug build, it always ends up crashing with an overflow in mswsock.dll though, so not sure where to go next...

[kano]

mwsock.dll ... hmm I wonder how many times that's been reported in here ... and your not running the latest version

I have now updated to 3.4.3. I just searched through this thread and didn't seem to find any solutions for fixing the mwsock.dll issue. Any thoughts?

Unfortunately we have no solution for a microsoft provided dll crashing. It should not be possible for our software to crash the dll unless there's a bug in the dll. The only suggestions are checking you have the latest dll and there are no virus/trojans that have attached to it.

I've been using windows and troubleshooting windows problems long enough to know that the DLL that "crashed" is regularly not the DLL with the problem.  I think the error reporting mechanism from windows is flawed (imagine that), and it's a routine that's calling winsock that is the problem, not winsock.  Thinking through it, a possible example would be a multithreaded app crashing while one thread is in winsock.  Or it could be winsock crashing when trying to perform a requested call back to the owning app.

I've also seen this type of misleading error message when DLL #1 needs DLL #2.  The error message will state DLL #1 isn't found, and when you look, you'll see DLL #1 is there.  The reality is DLL #1 is looking for DLL #2 and not finding it, but the error message only captures part of the info is gives misleading info.

Overall, I don't believe this is a mswinsock issue.  It's probably not a cgminer issue either, per se, but one of the 3rd party DLLs you are using that is calling mswinsock.

M

... of course there are other possibilities as I came across with libusb ...

I am doing something with libusb that ... it would appear ... no one else on the planet does?

Running a multi-threaded application to many devices through the libusb library that states it is thread safe.
However, it is not thread safe.
I found that the comments on the libusb site that stated it was thread safe in fact suggested to me that it wasn't.
One of the libusb fixes was indeed to make libusb calls thread safe in cgminer using locks.

So ... a mining application that is talking to many pools at once through a single dll that "May" be thread safe, might actually NOT be thread safe and since it may be indeed rare for applications to do this on their own, it may be that cgminer is the rare case finding the problem ...

Of course it MAY not be - but certainly no proof to discount it at this stage.

Edit: of course I am replying to this also:

Hmm. Thing is, the stratum code is all done raw now, not using any other libraries precisely because I had problems with libcurl and friends. So the code does raw socket calls which directly use winsock calls. So the problem is either in cgminer or the MS dll.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I doubt it's the winsock dll.  A lot of programs use that, and if there was a native problem in there, we'd be getting crashes elsewhere from other apps.
...

[mdude77]

Hmm. Thing is, the stratum code is all done raw now, not using any other libraries precisely because I had problems with libcurl and friends. So the code does raw socket calls which directly use winsock calls. So the problem is either in cgminer or the MS dll.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I doubt it's the winsock dll.  A lot of programs use that, and if there was a native problem in there, we'd be getting crashes elsewhere from other apps.

Yes a lot use the winsock dll. Note the issue is in mswsock.dll though, and it is actually very rare that applications use raw sockets on windows so I wouldn't say it's quite the same - firefox only recently started using it and lo and behold it's been getting crashes in the same library. Nonetheless, logically my code which is always in heavy development is far more likely to be at fault than an OS provided library (though we've been burnt by that enough already to know it's not impossible). Every attempt so far to get debugging with a full debug build, it always ends up crashing with an overflow in mswsock.dll though, so not sure where to go next...

Firefox is under continual development as well.  socket coding isn't simple, especially windows socket coding.  I personally have not seen any app crashes with firefox, and that's all I use.  if it is indeed a problem with winsock, for microsoft to address it you'll need to be able to provide poc code that causes the crash. 

Kano: would it help if I changed my cgminer instance to not have any backup pools?  then it's only communicating with one pool. 

M

[kano]

I'm not sure of the threading level within stratum when on a single pool.
ckolivas will know the answer to that.

[-ck]

I'm not sure of the threading level within stratum when on a single pool.
ckolivas will know the answer to that.

All writes are done from one thread. All reads are done from one thread. Therefore there is no chance of there being a race on reads or a race on writes. I very much doubt windows has an issue of writing and reading the same socket at the same time, nor would there be a problem using two different sockets at the same time. Debugging points to something in socket code, possibly on reconnecting or trying to communicate with a backup pool. I keep auditing the code and come up none the wiser, but I will continue to do so, or give up entirely and stop supporting windows (yeah right, 85% of cgminer users are on windows sigh).