[GUIDE] BitFury Miner Support/Tuning

[Cablez]

I am getting fed up of the SD card issues. anytime the miner needs to be powered off the card seems to be wiped.

I *think* that there is a relation between the SD issues and using the fan slots on the board - it might be possible that having 2x230mm fans spin down when power is removed is causing a small amount of power to be backfed onto the RPi until the fans slow to a stop.

when i did not have fans, i could turn off the PSU without any effects on the SD card.

I have a v1 M-board and I am constantly having SD corruption issues on reboot or shutdown. No fan headers here.  I just keep 3 images ready to go so I have little downtime due to software when I am messing around with the hardware.

[klondike_bar]

I am getting fed up of the SD card issues. anytime the miner needs to be powered off the card seems to be wiped.

I *think* that there is a relation between the SD issues and using the fan slots on the board - it might be possible that having 2x230mm fans spin down when power is removed is causing a small amount of power to be backfed onto the RPi until the fans slow to a stop.

when i did not have fans, i could turn off the PSU without any effects on the SD card.

I have a v1 M-board and I am constantly having SD corruption issues on reboot or shutdown. No fan headers here.  I just keep 3 images ready to go so I have little downtime due to software when I am messing around with the hardware.

hmm

also, ive been having 'semaphore timeout' errors when trying to write images with my sd card reader (internal) so i cant even reformat the bad card right now

[jddebug]

I am getting fed up of the SD card issues. anytime the miner needs to be powered off the card seems to be wiped.

I *think* that there is a relation between the SD issues and using the fan slots on the board - it might be possible that having 2x230mm fans spin down when power is removed is causing a small amount of power to be backfed onto the RPi until the fans slow to a stop.

when i did not have fans, i could turn off the PSU without any effects on the SD card.

I have a v1 M-board and I am constantly having SD corruption issues on reboot or shutdown. No fan headers here.  I just keep 3 images ready to go so I have little downtime due to software when I am messing around with the hardware.

hmm

also, ive been having 'semaphore timeout' errors when trying to write images with my sd card reader (internal) so i cant even reformat the bad card right now

On mine, when the card fails it is ruined. I had to start with a new one both times.

[Cablez]

That is odd.  I use the SD card formatter 4.0 for mine. It takes two passes to get the whole 4G card with overwrite but I can then re-image it just fine.

[spegelius]

Thanks for the tip
If you get to much hw errors on some chips - you may need to fine tune the scan delay multiplier in driver-bitfury.c (line 210 - between 900 and 1200) and the shift value in libbitfury.c (line 631 - between 0x100000 and 0x200000) ... I think I got them right, but they may be for my specific hardware configuration

EDIT:  for per chip info check:

Code:

php api-example.php stats | grep -v 'stats returned' | egrep -e chip -e work -e hw -e gh -e mhz -e clock

if for some of the chips it shows different MHz on each run you will need to tweak those values above

I'll do some testing later. However, there was some problems with the cgminer. First, i'm running a multimining setup, which means i poll for most profitable coin from coinchoose or coinwarz and then switch miners to mine that coin. Not sure if this gives any advantage nowadays, but been tweaking it for some time. With stratum proxy this works fine, as chainminer is running uninterrupted, only the proxy is restarted. Or course there's some rejected shares when switching coins, but from chainminer's side it's mostly business as usual.

Now enter cgminer; restarting it means first shutting down the chips and then finding them again and reinitializing. This seems to crap out at some point and chips aren't found anymore. It got to a point where there was only one chip found for first board. So i shut down cgminer and fired up chainminer/stratum-proxy with previous best.cnf. Not going well, first and second boards were way below normal speeds, some chips showed only error results and speed was 0.0GH/s. Only after deleting best.cnf and /run/shm/.chip.cnf, i.e. allowing chainminer to autotune speeds, i got all boards running fine. Phew, thought i had blown something for a minute...

Anyways, some ideas what might have happened:
* constant reinitialization crapped spi or chips or something...
* this resulted some chips left in a bad state; telling them to run at the 55 speed wasn't resetting them properly
* only after setting all chips to 54 (apparently chainminer does this in autotune mode) the chips were revived and now back to hashing at previous speeds
* or could it simply be that running constantly with too high speed finally craps the chips for some reason?

So with cgminer something like first setting the speed to 54 (or maybe 50?) and only after that tuning them to full speed might keep them working properly?

[KNK]

I don't think the chips are damaged if running at high speed ( but it also depends on the temp of course )
How do you stop cgminer?
If it is not clean shutdown - some chips may be left hashing (obviously old jobs) which may be the reason for them to remain undetected on the next start.

I don't see any reason to restart cgminer - you can enable or disable a pool from the API, so all you need to do is to feed the full list of pools/currencies on startup and disable the ones you don't want to use

[spegelius]

I have heatsinks at the backs of the hcards and 3 12cm fans blowing, they shouldn't be too hot.

I use API to shut cgminer down, but i've seen cgminer hang randomly so it is possbile that the last stage kill -9 might shut it down wrong way...

Good all with API, i'll have to implement that later this week or weekend. For now i'll stick with stratum proxy and pools that work well with it (namely pools that allow manual difficulty setting for miners).

[klondike_bar]

That is odd.  I use the SD card formatter 4.0 for mine. It takes two passes to get the whole 4G card with overwrite but I can then re-image it just fine.

I was having 'semaphore timeout' errors with win32diskimager in my Win7 64bit installation with 2 different (wrecked by the bitfury) SD cards and neither would format with SD CARD FORMATTER 4.0.

I loaded up my secondary Win7 32bit OS on the laptop (a Thinkpad T510) and was able to format and then image 1 SDS card. However, the second card would freeze up the formatting program around 90-100% and I got the same 'semaphore timeout' from Win32diskimager. I imagine this SD may be corrupt or damaged

[bobcaticus]

I switched to imageUSB and it works quite well.  We've noticed that there might have been a 'bad batch' of SanDisk SD cards.  If you are writing a V3 image, also make sure to use an 8GB card as the 4GB ones will not write out fully.

[spegelius]

I implemented the pool switching using API and it seems to work very well, been running @159GH/s for a few hours now.

I also tried to use BFGMiner as getwork proxy for chainminer, but for some reason BFGMiner sees most of the shares as HW errors, only few get accepted. Dunno what's with that...

I tried to tune the scan delay multiplier and shift value, but they seems to be optimal already. When i set the shift value to 0x200000 (from default 0x1200000), speed sank about 5% or so... Currently running with all chips on speed 55, which seems to be 8GH/s better than the settings i use with chainminer.

[KNK]

Thanks for the feedback.
With these values i still lose about 2% in wh errors (which are in fact software), but for me too any change makes it worse.
The problem (on my opinion) is that the driver is single thread and tries to guess when to send a new job to the chip (based on these values), which is not optimal as it also depends on the cpu load and varies with each cycle.

[GandalfG]

I am looking for an alternative to chainminer and its proxy.
Whats software are best for BFSB hardware ?  BFGminer or CGMiner, other alternatives

Do CGMiner has been running stably Bitfury?
Is formed instruction on how to run CGminer on RasperryPi?

[juhakall]

I am looking for an alternative to chainminer and its proxy.
Whats software are best for BFSB hardware ?  BFGminer or CGMiner, other alternatives

Do CGMiner has been running stably Bitfury?
Is formed instruction on how to run CGminer on RasperryPi?

BFGMiner works perfectly, I'm not sure if cgminer even has support yet.

You can use set-device to change chip clock speeds:

"set-device" : ["BSB:osc6_bits=55"] sets all chips to speed 55.

"set-device" : ["BSB:osc6_bits=55","BSB2:osc6_bits=54"] sets all chips to speed 55 and all chips in slot 2 to speed 54.

"set-device" : ["BSB:osc6_bits=55","BSB2:osc6_bits=54","BSB2aa:osc6_bits=53"] sets all chips to speed 55, all chips in slot 2 to speed 54 and a certain chip in slot 2 to speed 53.

You can mix these common/slot/chip settings arbitrarily, though it might result in a very long config line.

[GandalfG]

I am looking for an alternative to chainminer and its proxy.
Whats software are best for BFSB hardware ?  BFGminer or CGMiner, other alternatives

Do CGMiner has been running stably Bitfury?
Is formed instruction on how to run CGminer on RasperryPi?

BFGMiner works perfectly, I'm not sure if cgminer even has support yet.

You can use set-device to change chip clock speeds:

"set-device" : ["BSB:osc6_bits=55"] sets all chips to speed 55.

"set-device" : ["BSB:osc6_bits=55","BSB2:osc6_bits=54"] sets all chips to speed 55 and all chips in slot 2 to speed 54.

"set-device" : ["BSB:osc6_bits=55","BSB2:osc6_bits=54","BSB2aa:osc6_bits=53"] sets all chips to speed 55, all chips in slot 2 to speed 54 and a certain chip in slot 2 to speed 53.

You can mix these common/slot/chip settings arbitrarily, though it might result in a very long config line.

Thx for tip. Have next question

1 - BFG have failover function in pool settings ?
2 - What difference in performance between Chainminer and BFG
3 - Confirmed stability on different pool. For example chminer work unstable on Eligius for me.
4 - Where I find  complete instruction  how run BFGminer on RasperryPi ?

[kano]

I am looking for an alternative to chainminer and its proxy.
Whats software are best for BFSB hardware ?  BFGminer or CGMiner, other alternatives

Do CGMiner has been running stably Bitfury?
Is formed instruction on how to run CGminer on RasperryPi?

If you have BitFury boards, with a V1 or V2 controller, I've updated the driver in my git and it should work with either now.
https://github.com/kanoi/cgminer

I've tested it on BlackArrow hardware.
One V2 controller with 1 board, the other V2 controller with 6 boards: 3onSPI1, 2onSPI2, 1onSPI3.

Both work fine.

I, however, use Arch coz I find it more reliable on the RPi.

Getting cgminer on an RPi
http://www.kano-kun.net/?p=87

[darkfriend77]

I am looking for an alternative to chainminer and its proxy.
Whats software are best for BFSB hardware ?  BFGminer or CGMiner, other alternatives

Do CGMiner has been running stably Bitfury?
Is formed instruction on how to run CGminer on RasperryPi?

If you have BitFury boards, with a V1 or V2 controller, I've updated the driver in my git and it should work with either now.
https://github.com/kanoi/cgminer

I've tested it on BlackArrow hardware.
One V2 controller with 1 board, the other V2 controller with 6 boards: 3onSPI1, 2onSPI2, 1onSPI3.

Both work fine.

I, however, use Arch coz I find it more reliable on the RPi.

Getting cgminer on an RPi
http://www.kano-kun.net/?p=87

tempting ... is it possible to clock each chip separately?

[juhakall]

I am looking for an alternative to chainminer and its proxy.
Whats software are best for BFSB hardware ?  BFGminer or CGMiner, other alternatives

Do CGMiner has been running stably Bitfury?
Is formed instruction on how to run CGminer on RasperryPi?

BFGMiner works perfectly, I'm not sure if cgminer even has support yet.

You can use set-device to change chip clock speeds:

"set-device" : ["BSB:osc6_bits=55"] sets all chips to speed 55.

"set-device" : ["BSB:osc6_bits=55","BSB2:osc6_bits=54"] sets all chips to speed 55 and all chips in slot 2 to speed 54.

"set-device" : ["BSB:osc6_bits=55","BSB2:osc6_bits=54","BSB2aa:osc6_bits=53"] sets all chips to speed 55, all chips in slot 2 to speed 54 and a certain chip in slot 2 to speed 53.

You can mix these common/slot/chip settings arbitrarily, though it might result in a very long config line.

Thx for tip. Have next question

1 - BFG have failover function in pool settings ?
2 - What difference in performance between Chainminer and BFG
3 - Confirmed stability on different pool. For example chminer work unstable on Eligius for me.
4 - Where I find  complete instruction  how run BFGminer on RasperryPi ?

Failover support and correct behavior on all pools are the reasons you should switch from chainminer to BFGMiner. Performance should be equal. There should be compilation instructions on the README files.

[GandalfG]

I am looking for an alternative to chainminer and its proxy.
Whats software are best for BFSB hardware ?  BFGminer or CGMiner, other alternatives

Do CGMiner has been running stably Bitfury?
Is formed instruction on how to run CGminer on RasperryPi?

If you have BitFury boards, with a V1 or V2 controller, I've updated the driver in my git and it should work with either now.
https://github.com/kanoi/cgminer

I've tested it on BlackArrow hardware.
One V2 controller with 1 board, the other V2 controller with 6 boards: 3onSPI1, 2onSPI2, 1onSPI3.

Both work fine.

I, however, use Arch coz I find it more reliable on the RPi.

Getting cgminer on an RPi
http://www.kano-kun.net/?p=87

Thx Kano for link to detailed instruction. But its want work with standard Bitfury hardware. I mean M-Board and H-board from Bitfury shops.
If compile with BlackArrow support report "BlackArrowBitFuryGPIO failed to open spidev (2)"
I test it with scope today evening.

[zurg]

Anyone has an SD image for V1/V1.2 boards with something other then chainminer?

(I can host it for others.)

Kind of getting sick of hashrate drop on certain pools even after setting proxy to restart every 10min.

Thanks

[mdbssm]

Anyone has an SD image for V1/V1.2 boards with something other then chainminer?

(I can host it for others.)

Kind of getting sick of hashrate drop on certain pools even after setting proxy to restart every 10min.

Thanks

Instead of restarting the proxy, try restarting the miner every 3-4 hrs.

This has fixed weird dropouts on BTCGuild that would occur randomly once every 24-36hrs, despite proxy restarts.

Code:

0    */3       *       *       *       sudo /opt/bitfury/start-miner.sh