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

[flower1024]

The pool where donations were going was hacked and I'm considering moving all my shares to p2pool as well now. I have grave concerns about centralising work to pools and increasingly see p2pool - or something like it - as the solution for bitcoin's future strength, going back to its decentralised nature as its strength. This means I won't realistically have a way of accepting small hashrate contributions donations with --donation that I can reasonably support. So after much angst I have decided that I will be deprecating the donations feature in upcoming versions and go back to the previous donation model of as-and-when you feel like it.

I thank those who have used the --donation feature greatly till now. It averaged around 400Mh/s over that time and at least kept me "mining" while my own mining rig was dead for over a month.

I recommend people disable --donation now and restart their miners for I don't know what will happen to hashes going to the pool during this instability (it is going offline for 24+ hours likely).

+1 for choosing p2pool!
i never used --donation anyways but had send you some btc some month ago.

[Peao]

I use these flags

Code:

-I 8 --gpu-engine 950,850,830,950 --gpu-memclock 850,180,180,850  --auto-fan --temp-target 75 --temp-overheat 82

How do I check it's detecting right?  It lists in the same order as 2.1.2. --gpu-reorder worth checking?

I can't see anything wrong with that. Without --gpu-reorder it uses the same order as 2.1.2 would have detected. I guess you'd know pretty quickly if it was setting the wrong speed on the wrong device and...

[2012-02-05 00:01:17] GPU 0 AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series hardware monitoring enabled
[2012-02-05 00:01:17] GPU 1 ATI Radeon HD 5900 Series hardware monitoring enabled
[2012-02-05 00:01:17] GPU 2 ATI Radeon HD 5900 Series hardware monitoring enabled
[2012-02-05 00:01:17] GPU 3 AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series hardware monitoring enabled

looks pretty convincing. So I'm at a loss for why it should be any worse.

Note also that you are having it being disabled and reading OFF. There is only one place in the code where cgminer does this itself - when it hits the thermal cutoff limit. Now it is possible there is some code convolution issue going on somehow that makes the fan not rise when one of the GPUs is being restarted. Note that your bug report shows thread 2 being idle (which would be GPU 1) and then it proceeds to disable threads 4 and 5 (being GPU 2)... Interesting... I'll audit the code, but perhaps try it without auto-fan on, setting what you know to be a safe static fan speed and see if the problem persists.

ck, I'm having the same "OFF" problem described, in rigs with 5970 and 5870:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=28402.msg727748#msg727748

[The00Dustin]

Also, on a related note, maybe your processor can get 8MH/s and the 8MH/s extra isn't even coming from the video card.  If that is the case, cutting the CPU frequency in half would lower it to a 4 MH/s gain at a still much more expensive MH/W (although realistically, even if it is the GPU getting that, running the CPU 100% at half frequency will probably still draw enough power to make it a net loss).

Are you theorizing that my CPU is explicitly doing some of the work, as if I was CPU mining, or do you mean something more nuanced than that? I didn't think my CPU would be used for explicit mining unless I had it specifically enabled to do so. I'm carrying out the U experiments that you guys suggested as we speak, btw.

Only as one (very unlikely) possibility.  I have read that the 100% cpu bug is because AMD offloads some of the work to the processor to make a game run even faster (so why couldn't it do the same thing with hashing), but I have also read that it is how AMD was making sure the processor was instantly ready when the video card finishes its task (in which case it wouldn't be doing that).

[-ck]

Note also that you are having it being disabled and reading OFF. There is only one place in the code where cgminer does this itself - when it hits the thermal cutoff limit. Now it is possible there is some code convolution issue going on somehow that makes the fan not rise when one of the GPUs is being restarted. Note that your bug report shows thread 2 being idle (which would be GPU 1) and then it proceeds to disable threads 4 and 5 (being GPU 2)... Interesting... I'll audit the code, but perhaps try it without auto-fan on, setting what you know to be a safe static fan speed and see if the problem persists.

ck, I'm having the same "OFF" problem described, in rigs with 5970 and 5870:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=28402.msg727748#msg727748

I have a theory as to how this might be happening now, and it involves cards that may well be getting sick occasionally, and have committed some code to the git tree for it. It would be interesting for you to run your cards with the old version overnight that doesn't have this problem, and then after it has run for an extended period, go into the GPU menu and see if any of the GPUs have been re-initialised at any time or if the "Last initialised" time is close to the main "Started" time at the top.

[bulanula]

Stability testing continuing. Will post some updates soon but I need to do the benchmarking and stability testing.

[Vbs]

I had two rigs today with "dead" status on the gpu's (5850's on win x64), with error messages saying "Failed to reinit GPU thread" and "Thread <#> no longer exists" on 2.2.1. The strange thing is that it seems to have actually happened at the same time in both rigs (they were mining on the same pool, different workers, reported both dead for 10h). Could this be related to some pool communication bug?

[-ck]

I had two rigs today with "dead" status on the gpu's (5850's on win x64), with error messages saying "Failed to reinit GPU thread" and "Thread <#> no longer exists" on 2.2.1. The strange thing is that it seems to have actually happened at the same time in both rigs (they were mining on the same pool, different workers, reported both dead for 10h). Could this be related to some pool communication bug?

Yep, it sure could.

(no, I have no idea where or how though)

[rcocchiararo]

Im runnung Debian 6...

I gave up messing with init scripts that start screen sessions and put this in my /etc/rc.local instead

Code:

su - user -c "/path/to/cgminer/start/script.sh"

Oh, and i use command line arguments, because either on windows or linux, even after saving the config, it ignores me (cgminer always asks for input)

This is usually because you have a syntax error in your config.  You can see what the errors are if you specify the config.

Code:

cgminer -c ~/.cgminer/cgminer.conf

I don't know why it is built this way.  IMO, when you fail to parse a config, you should fail out, not act like there was no config.

Thx about the config, i fixed it, much nicer now XD

--
Putting

Code:

su - rcocchiararo -c "/home/rcocchiararo/bitcoin/startcg.sh"

in rc.local seems to do nothing.

Running that from a "root terminal" (inside rcocchiararo GUI loggin) nets me a CPU mining session

Code:

[2012-02-05 12:18:17] Error: Getting Device IDs (num)
[2012-02-05 12:18:17] clDevicesNum returned error, none usable
[2012-02-05 12:18:17] Started cgminer 2.1.2

My script has:

Code:

#!/bin/bash
export AMDAPPSDKROOT=/opt/AMD-APP-SDK-v2.4-lnx32/
export AMDAPPSDKSAMPLESROOT=/opt/AMD-APP-SDK-v2.4-lnx32/
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=${AMDAPPSDKROOT}lib/x86:${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}

export DISPLAY=:0

cgminer 2>>/var/log/cgminer.log

Maybe something from my "exports" is not ok ? i mean, just running "cgminer" from a terminal with my user (rcocchiararo) makes it work. (i once had the exports in .bashrc, but i no longer do).

also, i believe, at least on my debian system, it wont work to have that in rc.local, because it would be similar to double clicking my script and telling it to "run" instead of "run in terminal". If i do that, this is what happens:

Code:

[2012-02-05 12:02:55] Started cgminer 2.1.2
[2012-02-05 12:02:56] Long-polling activated for http://pit.deepbit.net:8332/listenChannel
Error opening terminal: unknown.

I tried using rc.local to launch screen, but similar things happen, i THINK i got it to run, but it was only with CPU (manually i can confirm it, unless i run it from my users terminal).

Maybe the fact that root is unable to login with GUI in debian (at least debian 6) causes cgminer some headaches ?

I tried:

Code:

su - rcocchiararo -c "/usr/bin/screen -dmS Miner /home/rcocchiararo/bitcoin/startcg.sh rcocchiararo"

Still, the last "rcocchiararo" seems to do nothing, because i changed that to "pepe" and i even ran:

Code:

/usr/bin/screen -dmS Miner /home/rcocchiararo/bitcoin/startcg.sh pepe

And the user who was running cgminer according to "top" was the one who launched the command (rcocchiararo, not pepe).

Im runnung Debian 6

With the following script, i understand that i get the same thing you indicated:

Code:

#! /bin/sh
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:          cgminer
# Required-Start:    $all
# Required-Stop:     $remote_fs $syslog 
# Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop:      0 1 6
# Short-Description: mining
# Description:       Start BTC Mining
### END INIT INFO

script
  sleep 15
  cd /home/rcocchiararo/bitcoin
  exec /usr/bin/screen -dmS Miner su -c /home/rcocchiararo/bitcoin/startcg.sh rcocchiararo
end script

This won't work as a sh script because the script keyword is an Upstart conf file function. You would want to take out both script/end script. I don't know offhand if Debian has Upstart but if it does then the best practice would be to use that by putting this as a conf file in /etc/init. If it doesn't then you could rewrite it as a script by removing the "script / end script" and taking out exec so it just calls screen. I don't think exec is a sh command either. Upstart conf file is not the same as a script.

The cgminer config writer doesn't write a fully working config unfortunately. You have to tweak some values - particularly zero ones. My version here does actually write a working config even with engine/memory values that work. But my version of the code is considered too dangerous by ckolivas to include in the mainline since it reads current ADL values to put in the config. There may be instances/cards where it causes problems - for my 5830s it works ok.

I thought that might be the case, thats why i tried with and without script/exec, and i still failed

-------------

EDIT: success!

Finally, by setting a "startup application" to run:

Code:

/usr/bin/screen -dmS Miner /home/rcocchiararo/bitcoin/startcg.sh rcocchiararo

Now my home server mines after rcocchiararo auto logins (that was already configured, but without screen, i had the "no terminal" issue.

[gnar1ta$]

Note also that you are having it being disabled and reading OFF. There is only one place in the code where cgminer does this itself - when it hits the thermal cutoff limit. Now it is possible there is some code convolution issue going on somehow that makes the fan not rise when one of the GPUs is being restarted. Note that your bug report shows thread 2 being idle (which would be GPU 1) and then it proceeds to disable threads 4 and 5 (being GPU 2)... Interesting... I'll audit the code, but perhaps try it without auto-fan on, setting what you know to be a safe static fan speed and see if the problem persists.

Running 10+ hours without auto-fan and no errors. I'll update if I get one, but looks promising.

[DeathAndTaxes]

Also, on a related note, maybe your processor can get 8MH/s and the 8MH/s extra isn't even coming from the video card.  If that is the case, cutting the CPU frequency in half would lower it to a 4 MH/s gain at a still much more expensive MH/W (although realistically, even if it is the GPU getting that, running the CPU 100% at half frequency will probably still draw enough power to make it a net loss).

Are you theorizing that my CPU is explicitly doing some of the work, as if I was CPU mining, or do you mean something more nuanced than that? I didn't think my CPU would be used for explicit mining unless I had it specifically enabled to do so. I'm carrying out the U experiments that you guys suggested as we speak, btw.

Only as one (very unlikely) possibility.  I have read that the 100% cpu bug is because AMD offloads some of the work to the processor to make a game run even faster (so why couldn't it do the same thing with hashing), but I have also read that it is how AMD was making sure the processor was instantly ready when the video card finishes its task (in which case it wouldn't be doing that).

No.  No hashing is offloaded to CPU.  If you enable CPU mining it will operate as a seperate OpenCL device.  100% CPU bug isn't work being done it is just clock cycles being wasted.

[ancow]

Getting funny behaviour disabling a GPU within cgminer from current git:

Code:

GPU 0: 11.9 / 12.4 Mh/s | A:0  R:0  HW:0  U:0.00/m  I:1
64.5 C  F: 30 1.000000E+00: 550 MHz  M: 800 Mhz  V: 1.000V  A: 99% P: 0%
Last initialised: [2012-02-05 23:29:14]
Intensity: 1
Thread 0: 5.8 Mh/s Enabled ALIVE
Thread 1: 6.2 Mh/s Enabled ALIVE

[E]nable [D]isable [I]ntensity [R]estart GPU [C]hange settings
Or press any other key to continue
GPU 0: 11.9 / 12.4 Mh/s | A:0  R:0  HW:0  U:0.00/m  I:1
64.5 C  F: 30 1.000000E+00: 550 MHz  M: 800 Mhz  V: 1.000V  A: 99% P: 0%
Last initialised: [2012-02-05 23:29:14]
Intensity: 1
Thread 0: 5.8 Mh/s Disabled ALIVE
Thread 1: 6.2 Mh/s Disabled ALIVE

[E]nable [D]isable [I]ntensity [R]estart GPU [C]hange settings
Or press any other key to continue
[2012-02-05 23:29:25] Thread 1 being disabled
[2012-02-05 23:29:25] Thread 1 being re-enabled
[2012-02-05 23:29:26] Thread 0 being disabled
[2012-02-05 23:29:26] Thread 1 being disabled

This isn't 100% reproducible so far (happened 4/5 tries) - is this known/expected?

[-ck]

Getting funny behaviour disabling a GPU within cgminer from current git:

Code:

GPU 0: 11.9 / 12.4 Mh/s | A:0  R:0  HW:0  U:0.00/m  I:1
64.5 C  F: 30 1.000000E+00: 550 MHz  M: 800 Mhz  V: 1.000V  A: 99% P: 0%
Last initialised: [2012-02-05 23:29:14]
Intensity: 1
Thread 0: 5.8 Mh/s Enabled ALIVE
Thread 1: 6.2 Mh/s Enabled ALIVE

[E]nable [D]isable [I]ntensity [R]estart GPU [C]hange settings
Or press any other key to continue
GPU 0: 11.9 / 12.4 Mh/s | A:0  R:0  HW:0  U:0.00/m  I:1
64.5 C  F: 30 1.000000E+00: 550 MHz  M: 800 Mhz  V: 1.000V  A: 99% P: 0%
Last initialised: [2012-02-05 23:29:14]
Intensity: 1
Thread 0: 5.8 Mh/s Disabled ALIVE
Thread 1: 6.2 Mh/s Disabled ALIVE

[E]nable [D]isable [I]ntensity [R]estart GPU [C]hange settings
Or press any other key to continue
[2012-02-05 23:29:25] Thread 1 being disabled
[2012-02-05 23:29:25] Thread 1 being re-enabled
[2012-02-05 23:29:26] Thread 0 being disabled
[2012-02-05 23:29:26] Thread 1 being disabled

This isn't 100% reproducible so far (happened 4/5 tries) - is this known/expected?

Yeah it just passes through the check for "dynamic" and might enable/disable once or twice before doing the right thing in the end. It does end up disabled doesn't it?

[ancow]

Yeah it just passes through the check for "dynamic" and might enable/disable once or twice before doing the right thing in the end. It does end up disabled doesn't it?

That it does. Just looks a little strange.

[-ck]

Yeah it just passes through the check for "dynamic" and might enable/disable once or twice before doing the right thing in the end. It does end up disabled doesn't it?

That it does. Just looks a little strange.

I'll make it prettier

[Electricbees]

Just started using this over GUI, and I must say, I am very impressed.
I bumped up from 1.8Ghash to 2.1. The improvement was definitely worth the few seconds of setup. 

[bulanula]

OK. So AFAIK there are 5 kernel settings we have to adjust here :

BFI_INT ( where can I see if this is on / off ? )
Fastloop ( where can I see if this is on / off ? )

Vectors
Worksize
Intensity

What is the long8 at the end of the .bin produced ?

Thanks !

[TheHarbinger]

OK. So AFAIK there are 5 kernel settings we have to adjust here :

BFI_INT ( where can I see if this is on / off ? )
Fastloop ( where can I see if this is on / off ? )

Vectors
Worksize
Intensity

What is the long8 at the end of the .bin produced ?

Thanks !

Honestly, unless you are running 7000 series cards, you can leave all these at their defaults with the exception of "Intensity", which should be set to "d" for you desktop monitor, and 8 for dedicated mining cards.

[-ck]

New version 2.2.2, source up for now, top post, binaries pending.

Changelog:
Version 2.2.2 - February 6, 2012

- Provide support for the submitold extension on a per-pool basis based on the
value being detected in a longpoll.
- Don't send a ping to a dynamic device if it's not enabled as that will just
enable it for one pass and then disable it again.
- Rewrite the convoluted get_work() function to be much simpler and roll work as
much as possible with each new work item.
- Roll as much work as possible from the work returned from a longpoll.
- Rolling work on each loop through the mining thread serves no purpose.
- Allow to stage more than necessary work items if we're just rolling work.
- Replace divide_work with reuse_work function used twice.
- Give rolled work a new ID to make sure there is no confusion in the hashtable
lookups.
- Remove now-defunct hash_div variables.
- Remove unused get_dondata function.
- Silence ADL warnings.
- Silence unused parameter warnings.
- Stagger the restart of every next thread per device to keep devices busy ahead
of accessory threads per device.
- Deprecate the --donation feature. Needlessly complex, questionable usefulness,
depends on author's server and a central pool of some kind, and was not heavily
adopted.
- It's devices that report back now, not threads, update message.
- Continue auto-management of fan and engine speeds even if a device is disabled
for safety reasons.
- No need to check we're highest performance level when throttling GPU engine
speed.
- Abstract out tests for whether work has come from a block that has been seen
before and whether a string is from a previously seen block.
- Probe but don't set the timeout to 15 seconds as some networks take a long
time to timeout.
- Remove most compiler warnings from api.c
- Add last share's pool info in cgpu_info
- Allow the OpenCL platform ID to be chosen with --gpu-platform.
- Iterate over all platforms displaying their information and number of devices
when --ndevs is called.
- Deprecate main.c
- Some networks can take a long time to resolve so go back to 60 second timeouts
instead of 15.
- Only enable curses on failure if curses is desired.
- Fix warnings in bitforce.c
- Bugfix: Need to open BitForce tty for read-write
- Fix various build issues.
- Modularize code: main.c -> device-cpu + device-gpu
- Fix phatk kernel not working on non-bitalign capable devices (Nvidia, older
ATI).
- Update poclbm kernel for better performance on GCN and new SDKs with bitalign
support when not BFI INT patching. Update phatk kernel to work properly for non
BFI INT patched kernels, providing support for phatk to run on GCN and non-ATI
cards.
- Return last accepted share pool/time for devices
- Display accepted share pool/time for CPUs
- Bug intensity always shows GPU 0
- Update example web miner.php to use new API commands

[kano]

...
- Update example web miner.php to use new API commands

Anyone who used the old one this one should be interesting to look at once or twice
(I of course use it to view the status of my rig since it's all in one page)
Of course there are other more complex ones out there for pure display only
This one also happens to allow you to change everything that the API allows (unless I missed something )

[ancow]

With the latest version from git, I keep getting this:

Code:

(gdb) bt
#0  0x00007fae64776405 in *__GI_raise (sig=<optimized out>) at ../nptl/sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/raise.c:64
#1  0x00007fae64779680 in *__GI_abort () at abort.c:92
#2  0x00007fae647ace0b in __libc_message (do_abort=<optimized out>, fmt=<optimized out>) at ../sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/libc_fatal.c:189
#3  0x00007fae647b6656 in malloc_printerr (action=3, str=0x7fae6488d3e8 "double free or corruption (!prev)", ptr=<optimized out>) at malloc.c:6283
#4  0x00007fae647bb38c in *__GI___libc_free (mem=<optimized out>) at malloc.c:3738
#5  0x000000000040d4af in free_work (work=0x1573ee0) at cgminer.c:1550
#6  miner_thread (userdata=0x124eda0) at cgminer.c:3211
#7  0x00007fae6580ab50 in start_thread (arg=<optimized out>) at pthread_create.c:304
#8  0x00007fae648194ad in clone () at ../sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/x86_64/clone.S:112
#9  0x0000000000000000 in ?? ()