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

[bitlane]

What does it take to get CGminer voltage control working under Windows ?  (Windows 7 x64)
I have been able to use every other feature, including clock and memory speed adjustments, but never voltage control using CGMiner.
Anyone care to share ?

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[neptop]

When I start cgminer with a -Q bigger than 2 it doesn't seem to have an effect.

[TurdHurdur]

Perhaps my question was vague. I'd like to know how to specify differing vector and worksize for different cards?

You can do -I 4,9, but you cannot do the same with -v or -w:

Code:

cgminer: -v: '4,2' is not a number
cgminer: -w: '128,64' is not a number

Is there a means of doing this I've not considered, or perhaps it's a feature that could be added?

[-ck]

Perhaps my question was vague. I'd like to know how to specify differing vector and worksize for different cards?

You can do -I 4,9, but you cannot do the same with -v or -w:

Code:

cgminer: -v: '4,2' is not a number
cgminer: -w: '128,64' is not a number

Is there a means of doing this I've not considered, or perhaps it's a feature that could be added?

Currently it only accepts one number since it tries to use sane defaults anyway. I could be added as a feature, but with so much going on in the cgminer code at the moment, it's very low priority since it's not something people request.

[-ck]

edit

no change at all

i know this sounds very strange but watching this thing it almost looks like its trying to maintain a mhash less than 500 total or something

the gpus mhash fluctuations constantly going from 20-100+ and back down each one keeps changing but the aggregate speed stays around 500 mhash for all 5 cards...

I've seen reports like this before... something funky going on here. See what happens to the hash rate if you disable devices one by one in the menu. If you have m multiple screens set up on the one card in your config instead of one screen per card, opencl makes them all separate devices, so you're only mining on one card. Do they all spin up or is only one card actually mining when you have 5 devices adding up to one card's output?

[Proofer]

Hey Con,

I guess here is a good place to restart our discussion, I registered with Github and took a first look into it. Is there an easy way for me to help you with the code itself via commits or pull-requests? I have never worked with Github, so that's all new. But as DiaKGCN evolves I would be glad to look after that part in CGMINER without the need for you to always implement the changes via the Phoenix version of the kernel. I don't want to fiddle in your code, but I would love to help not by only writing mails .

Dia

Yep, start reading github bootcamp
https://github.com/

I found this useful:  Git Reference; it's a tutorial as much as a reference.

[DeathAndTaxes]

Slightly off topic but adding RPC to cgminer was major enhancement for cgminer and it allowed cgminer to be integrated into BAMT. For those of you looking to use cgminer as the engine for more comprehensive set of monitoring and configuring tools BAMT is the solution.

cgminer + BAMT = match made in heaven.  BAMT originally supported phoenix and still does, however more cgminer users running BAMT (and donating to the developer ) means more emphasis by the developer on cgminer.  Personally I think tighter integration between BAMT and cgminer is possible and expect better things in the future.

BAMT Thread:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=28967.0

BTW the docs are kinda rough so I will be making a newbie BAMT guide aimed specifically towards cgminer users get up to speed using BAMT.

I thought I would drop some eye candy to encourage every cgminer user who hasn't tried BAMT to try it out.



Nice console view of all 24 of my cards (6 are running p2pool as a test and thus I haven't moved them over to BAMT yet).

You want historical monitoring you say?



cgminer is very bandwidth efficient but it needs sockets LOTS of sockets to run at peak efficiency.  How many sockets?
Well with BAMT you know.



So looks like at peak cgminer is opening 280 sockets per rig.  For a 5 rig 11GH farm that is ~1100 open sockets.  Some cheaper/older routers can't hande that and choke.  



So if you haven't given conman a donation lately .... do it now.  If it hadn't been for his hard work we wouldn't this awesome customizable engine.  If you didn't know already Kano did the RPC work.  If you find it useful drop him a donation too.  If you want RPC expanded well be sure to drop a donation first.  RPC is the "glue" which integrates BAMT + cgminer.  Without it getting cgminer added likely never would have happen.


If you haven't already commit to trying BAMT this weekend.  If you like it, then support the primary developer Lord Crappo and be sure to mention it was cgminer support that brought you to BAMT.

[jjshabadoo]

hey D&T, that would be great, i have bee seriously considering BAMT as linuxcoin is just getting too out of date and i am afraid to mess with it because i am finally stable, but i would love to upgrade my ati drivers and my cgminer since only 2.0.7 works for me in linuxcoin. I also can't stand linuxcoin's finickyness.  I also got a deal on some 6990's and am thinking BAMT with newest ATI drivers, etc. would be really helpful. i have a feeling linuxcoin is NOT going to like a 6990.

besides I'd prefer to work with a dedicated mining OS that is being supported and would be glad to donate to the developer.

Also, those statistical graphics look great.

[jjiimm_64]

hey D&T, that would be great, i have bee seriously considering BAMT as linuxcoin is just getting too out of date and i am afraid to mess with it because i am finally stable, but i would love to upgrade my ati drivers and my cgminer since only 2.0.7 works for me in linuxcoin. I also can't stand linuxcoin's finickyness.  I also got a deal on some 6990's and am thinking BAMT with newest ATI drivers, etc. would be really helpful. i have a feeling linuxcoin is NOT going to like a 6990.

besides I'd prefer to work with a dedicated mining OS that is being supported and would be glad to donate to the developer.

Also, those statistical graphics look great.

JFTR  i use linuxcoin for almost all of my rigs.  agree it is 'finicky'    but cgminer 2.2 does work on it as you can see here:

http://cgminerweb.com/example.miner.php.html

I can update core clocks, switch pools, etc, etc

[P4man]

Thanks for the headsup DnT. I didnt realize BAMT now supported cgminer, or even that it was still supported. That looks really nice. Linuxcoin works fine ATM, and Im pretty familiar with ubuntu, less so with debian, but those stats look tempting enough to give BAMT a spin.

[-ck]

Okay for those who want to get 7970 working well with cgminer on linux, I've been up most of the night since I got the card (lol) trying to get it working and then fiddled with settings to find a sweet spot.

Firstly: There is no actual "stable release" driver for this GPU yet. The driver you're directed to is a special release not really version numbered (like 12.1 etc). The 12.1 driver does NOT work with 7970 so when I put the 7970 in the machine with 6970s it didn't even show up. Then when I installed the GCN ati driver amd-driver-installer-8.921-x86.x86_64.run the 6970s wouldn't show up! Goddamn amd. I modified the xorg to add the extra devices, and xorg would start up but cgminer would just crash opencl when starting. After much searching around sharky suggested I change the card order, so I put the 7970 into slot 1 and the 6970s into slots 2-4. Again  the ati driver didn't show up the 6x devices with aticonfig --lsa, and wouldn't configure the xorg for more than just the 7970. Then I checked the GPU positions

Code:

lspci  | grep VGA
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Device 6798
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Device 6718
07:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Device 6718
08:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Device 6718

I used the PCI bus position entries and edited the xorg.conf file into the following generic version:

Code:

Section "Monitor"
        Identifier   "aticonfig-Monitor[0]-0"
        Option      "VendorName" "ATI Proprietary Driver"
        Option      "ModelName" "Generic Autodetecting Monitor"
        Option      "DPMS" "true"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
        Identifier   "aticonfig-Monitor[1]-0"
        Option      "VendorName" "ATI Proprietary Driver"
        Option      "ModelName" "Generic Autodetecting Monitor"
        Option      "DPMS" "true"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
        Identifier   "aticonfig-Monitor[2]-0"
        Option      "VendorName" "ATI Proprietary Driver"
        Option      "ModelName" "Generic Autodetecting Monitor"
        Option      "DPMS" "true"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
        Identifier   "aticonfig-Monitor[3]-0"
        Option      "VendorName" "ATI Proprietary Driver"
        Option      "ModelName" "Generic Autodetecting Monitor"
        Option      "DPMS" "true"
EndSection

Section "Device"
        Identifier  "aticonfig-Device[0]-0"
        Driver      "fglrx"
        BusID       "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

Section "Device"
        Identifier  "aticonfig-Device[1]-0"
        Driver      "fglrx"
        BusID       "PCI:2:0:0"
EndSection

Section "Device"
        Identifier  "aticonfig-Device[2]-0"
        Driver      "fglrx"
        BusID       "PCI:7:0:0"
EndSection

Section "Device"
        Identifier  "aticonfig-Device[3]-0"
        Driver      "fglrx"
        BusID       "PCI:8:0:0"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
        Identifier "aticonfig-Screen[0]-0"
        Device     "aticonfig-Device[0]-0"
        Monitor    "aticonfig-Monitor[0]-0"
        DefaultDepth     24
        SubSection "Display"
                Viewport   0 0
                Depth     24
        EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "Screen"
        Identifier "aticonfig-Screen[1]-0"
        Device     "aticonfig-Device[1]-0"
        Monitor    "aticonfig-Monitor[1]-0"
        DefaultDepth     24
        SubSection "Display"
                Viewport   0 0
                Depth     24
        EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "Screen"
        Identifier "aticonfig-Screen[2]-0"
        Device     "aticonfig-Device[2]-0"
        Monitor    "aticonfig-Monitor[2]-0"
        DefaultDepth     24
        SubSection "Display"
                Viewport   0 0
                Depth     24
        EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "Screen"
        Identifier "aticonfig-Screen[3]-0"
        Device     "aticonfig-Device[3]-0"
        Monitor    "aticonfig-Monitor[3]-0"
        DefaultDepth     24
        SubSection "Display"
                Viewport   0 0
                Depth     24
        EndSubSection
EndSection

This would still only show up one device with aticonfig --lsa, but cgminer could detect them all.

Code:

cgminer -n
[2012-02-09 09:49:19] CL Platform 0 vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
[2012-02-09 09:49:19] CL Platform 0 name: AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing
[2012-02-09 09:49:19] CL Platform 0 version: OpenCL 1.1 AMD-APP (844.4)
[2012-02-09 09:49:19] Platform 0 devices: 4
[2012-02-09 09:49:19] GPU 0 AMD Radeon HD 7900 Series  hardware monitoring enabled
[2012-02-09 09:49:19] GPU 1 AMD Radeon HD 6900 Series hardware monitoring enabled
[2012-02-09 09:49:19] GPU 2 AMD Radeon HD 6900 Series hardware monitoring enabled
[2012-02-09 09:49:19] GPU 3 AMD Radeon HD 6900 Series hardware monitoring enabled
[2012-02-09 09:49:19] 4 GPU devices max detected

After much playing around, I found the particular card I had would run stable at clockspeeds of 1200/1050. The 7970 has a mandatory no-more-than 150 difference between the GPU engine clockspeed and the GPU memory clockspeed much like the 6970 had a 125 difference. Note that with windows overclocking tools they can get around this using other backdoors to the devices which I can't do. Powertune of +5% provided the most boost to performance as I've seen with the 6970s and going over this made no difference.

On first successful running, I noticed the dreaded CPU usage bug was back! Luckily I heard this was not universal and

Code:

export GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS=1

fixed it.

Then I played around with various combinations of gpu threads and intensities and found that there is an inflexion point in intensity where the CPU usage jumps up from the usually very low usage. With 1 GPU thread, an intensity up to 13 does not increase CPU usage. With 2 threads an intensity of 11 does not. More threads did not help hashrate.

Now bear in mind that this is an unmodified cgminer 2.2.3 so no new fancy kernels, but here is the final performance with intensity 11, engine 1200, memory 1050, powertune 5. See if you can spot the 790 amongst these :

Code:

 GPU 0:  71.0C 4125RPM | 694.5/694.8Mh/s | A:355 R:1 HW:0 U:10.18/m I:11
 GPU 1:  72.5C 5107RPM | 426.4/427.4Mh/s | A:200 R:0 HW:0 U: 5.73/m I: 9
 GPU 2:  73.0C 4341RPM | 425.1/426.9Mh/s | A:214 R:1 HW:0 U: 6.14/m I: 9
 GPU 3:  72.5C 3892RPM | 434.6/436.1Mh/s | A:227 R:1 HW:0 U: 6.51/m I: 9

So that's with the now ancient poclbm kernel in cgminer that was modified recently just to work with 7970 aka GCN but has no real performance enhancements. Now I need to fiddle with kernels and wait to see what diablo comes up with as well.

edit: Note that GCN ONLY works with the 2.6 SDK which has lousy performance on other cards, so I kept my old .bin files for the 6970s so that cgminer would just use those instead of regenerating them after I installed the new driver and sdk.

[gnar1ta$]

That is nice ck.  Good to see your enjoying that new toy.  Any idea how many watts it's drawing for those 694 Mh/s?

[kano]

Slightly off topic but adding RPC to cgminer was major enhancement for cgminer and it allowed cgminer to be integrated into BAMT. For those of you looking to use cgminer as the engine for more comprehensive set of monitoring and configuring tools BAMT is the solution.
...

So BAMT is a set of programs with a web front end that he packaged an entire OS with.
Basically I'd guess it's web code and a background program with some database storage.

I've said this about linuxcoin before and I guess I'll say it about BAMT now too (for people with 1 or 2 rigs)
My reason for having my install script is coz I don't want to trust someone else to put together the entire OS with bitcoin as the target in mind.
I need only trust the applications I install.
More-so, I'm sure that the developer of BAMT doesn't verify every package he puts in the OS, whereas with any original OS install, you simply are trusting the OS supplier for the base OS and then any extra non OS supplied apps as you choose.

Also, it's not just an issue of who the developer is, you have to trust his software anyway, but it's the other unfortunate issue of supplied already installed OSs that then get 'other' downloads of them that people learn the hard way to not trust those 'other' downloads

Anyway - the actual point of this is that there should be a set of steps required to add BAMT to BAMT's choice of OS.
So those technically minded do not need to trust someone else's copy of an OS.
Is there already?

Of course, if you have lots (or 100s) of mining rigs, any manual install procedure is going to take a lot of time ... but making a copy of a USB or a HDD already setup should make that a lot quicker to at least start the process
(yeah you usually can just image a linux HDD and run it on other different hardware)

[-ck]

That is nice ck.  Good to see your enjoying that new toy.  Any idea how many watts it's drawing for those 694 Mh/s?

No idea I'm afraid.

GPU 0: 695.0 / 693.5 Mh/s | A:1246  R:3  HW:0  U:9.91/m  I:11
72.0 C  F: 71% (4139 RPM)  E: 1200 MHz  M: 1050 Mhz  V: 1.170V  A: 99% P: 5%

GPU 1: 428.2 / 427.3 Mh/s | A:729  R:2  HW:0  U:5.80/m  I:9
73.5 C  F: 62% (5111 RPM)  E: 960 MHz  M: 835 Mhz  V: 1.175V  A: 99% P: 5%

GPU 2: 428.2 / 427.4 Mh/s | A:781  R:1  HW:0  U:6.21/m  I:9
73.5 C  F: 48% (4292 RPM)  E: 960 MHz  M: 835 Mhz  V: 1.175V  A: 99% P: 5%

GPU 3: 437.7 / 436.7 Mh/s | A:810  R:1  HW:0  U:6.45/m  I:9
73.5 C  F: 64% (3894 RPM)  E: 1000 MHz  M: 875 Mhz  V: 1.175V  A: 99% P: 5%

They all have different airflow characteristics due to their place on the motherboard, GPU 3 is in the coolest spot followed by 0, 2, 1.

Heat generation should be proportional to energy usage but the back of the 7970 is more open than the 6970 so I think the airflow through it is better. Pulling a rough estimate out of my arse, I'd say that it uses the same amount of power volt-per volt, clockspeed-per clockspeed as the 6970, and I happen to be running it at higher clockspeed. The difference is, of course, that it produces a much higher hashrate than the 6970 at the same clocks and voltage.

[gnar1ta$]

Anyway - the actual point of this is that there should be a set of steps required to add BAMT to BAMT's choice of OS.
So those technically minded do not need to trust someone else's copy of an OS.
Is there already?

I don't know all the technical stuff, but I know it's just a standard Debian live distro that runs a few config files at startup.  You really just dd the .img, run the fixer to install current fixes, edit one file, restart the mine service and your mining.  Don't get me wrong, I use and recommend your install guide and it's great, but with multiple headless rigs nothing is faster to set up than BAMT.

[miscreanity]

My reason for having my install script is coz I don't want to trust someone else to put together the entire OS with bitcoin as the target in mind.
I need only trust the applications I install.

This was part of my rationale for looking into switching over to Arch, the main one being rolling updates as opposed to major point releases. That alone makes it easier to keep current. Now all I need is the time to handle the first run.

And nice Accepted/Rejected ratio

[sveetsnelda]

edit

no change at all

i know this sounds very strange but watching this thing it almost looks like its trying to maintain a mhash less than 500 total or something

the gpus mhash fluctuations constantly going from 20-100+ and back down each one keeps changing but the aggregate speed stays around 500 mhash for all 5 cards...

Check your CPU usage, my friend.  I'll bet it's being bottlenecked.  This is exactly how it'll behave if your threads are starving for CPU time.

[kano]

Anyway - the actual point of this is that there should be a set of steps required to add BAMT to BAMT's choice of OS.
So those technically minded do not need to trust someone else's copy of an OS.
Is there already?

I don't know all the technical stuff, but I know it's just a standard Debian live distro that runs a few config files at startup.  You really just dd the .img, run the fixer to install current fixes, edit one file, restart the mine service and your mining.  Don't get me wrong, I use and recommend your install guide and it's great, but with multiple headless rigs nothing is faster to set up than BAMT.

Heh I'm not out to get lots of people to use my script

In fact there are issues with using USB and even low memory with an HDD install that I've mentioned (about 2 weeks ago?) when I had trouble with my own script
I need to update that soon now that I think I've worked it all out ...
(main problem: if you ever forget to 'sync' before shutdown can trash it ...)

I just thought I'd mention the reasoning behind why I use a base OS that others may not think of.

And even then if the install is documented to go on top of an OS, that resolves that also.

[QuantumFoam]

I just encountered a weird problem with the latest version 2.2.3. One of my backup pools went dead and it seemed to be interfering with cgminer's ability to update the statistics on top (mhs, gpu temp and fan rpm). Basically, these stats were frozen and cgminer was only acting on what they last said (so fan rpms and such were not being adjusted properly, a potentially dangerous situation). When I disabled the offending pool, stats began updating again normally. Enabled the pool again and right back to frozen stats. A couple of times tonight this caused the fans to go to 100% due to overheating because the rpms were being kept too low due to the last stat update being too long ago.

Not sure what else I can do to help track this down, pool management is set to failover, but failover only flag is not enabled.

[-ck]

I just encountered a weird problem with the latest version 2.2.3. One of my backup pools went dead and it seemed to be interfering with cgminer's ability to update the statistics on top (mhs, gpu temp and fan rpm). Basically, these stats were frozen and cgminer was only acting on what they last said (so fan rpms and such were not being adjusted properly, a potentially dangerous situation). When I disabled the offending pool, stats began updating again normally. Enabled the pool again and right back to frozen stats. A couple of times tonight this caused the fans to go to 100% due to overheating because the rpms were being kept too low due to the last stat update being too long ago.

Not sure what else I can do to help track this down, pool management is set to failover, but failover only flag is not enabled.

Interesting find! I will investigate this. Thanks.