BAMT - Easy persistent USB key based linux for dedicated miners/mining farms

[max in montreal]

Also, has anyone else had file corruption happen when the do a cold reboot of a machine? I am not sure if I just have bad luck or if this is something to be expected. The USB key is fine, but needs a fresh bamt install before it works again. Any pointers in the area would be greatly appreciated.

I have been having the same problem. 2 exact motherboards, 2 exact USB keys, 2 exact power supplies. one has 2 X 5970 and one 5870 and the other has 1 X 5970 and one 5870...the one with the 2 cards is having a problem with the corrupt USB key, and I also have reimage it all the time.

Is there a way to keep an image of the USB key safe somewhere so when you need it you just reimage the USB key?

[max in montreal]

No just any USB thumb drive, I have a gigabyte 990FX board, and BAMT will not boot, apparently due to gigabyte not liking usb drives with multiple partitions as noted in this thread..  just wondering if anyone has come up with a fix, I guess I could just do up pxe or something but id rather not use actual sata hard drives..

I could never get BAMT to boot on an MSI motherboard.  Nothing I did worked.  I don't think it is a gigabyte issue maybe a BIOS/firmware/chipset issue. 

i am booting usb on an msi 890fx-gd70 no issues. other than sometimes the USB gets corrupted...

[BinaryMage]

Thanks, I managed to fix this. Turns out X was outputting through a different GPU. Now it's mining, but 3 of my cards are only about 50% load... Aggression is set at 14, any ideas?

[max in montreal]

anyone running BAMT with 3 5970's

what is ur current mh/s per gpu?

im only getting 305 mh/s atm... wondering if thats as high as they will go, i was pushing 380-400 per gpu in win7 with MSI AB...

if u are getting anything near the 400mh/s i'd like to know what is needed to be done to get them there.

If a solution is presented to me, i will provide btc's in return for the helpful insight  


305 mh/s seems low to me, so any help would be great, or reasoning as to why im only able to get them to that.

First you need to check what clock your card are running at,  often time the GPU will fallback to 550mhz for a second when VRM are overheating.

I've two on a rig doing 368 (x4) at 800mhz,   The link from 800mhz to 368 scale linearly with any 5870-clock,

Do you use phatk2 ?, did you apply all fixes ?

i have them at 800mhz on my 5970s

running phatk2+all fixes  

maybe its too much to have 3 5970's on 1 1300w?

I run my 3 5970 rigs with 2 1000w PSUs and they were a little finicky at first. I run mine at 825/500 and get about 370Mh/s per core.

800/100 on mine and am getting 360

[trouserless]

I've downloaded the most recent BAMT to try as an alternative to linuxcoin.  Got it dd'd on an 8GB USB stick and worked the config file to match the same aticonfig settings I run with linuxcoin (latest-final).  I started up gpumon and watched (nice console, BTW - only works with "sudo" for some reason).  The cards were at full speed for roughly 2 minutes then they would effectively stop mining for a few seconds and then slowly restart every few minutes.  I checked on the screen consoles and each card (5970-daul, 5850, 5870) and noticed that they were going idle and detaching.  As the miners would re-attach, the number of invalids would climb to over 8% (within an hour).  I am currently mining with btcguild only (so my pools file is just one line).  I've checked my phoenix flags and they are identical to what I was running on linuxcoin.  I'm back on linuxcoin for now, but would like to move to BAMT as I'm growing beyond one miner and would like to spend less time maintaining them.  Anything obvious I'm missing?

[bulanula]

Thanks, I managed to fix this. Turns out X was outputting through a different GPU. Now it's mining, but 3 of my cards are only about 50% load... Aggression is set at 14, any ideas?

How did you manage to fix it ?

It seems I am having the same issue. Black screen and CTRL ALT F1 does nothing and neither is num lock working.

[BinaryMage]

How did you manage to fix it ?

It seems I am having the same issue. Black screen and CTRL ALT F1 does nothing and neither is num lock working.

I had five cards on one motherboard; the BIOS and initial boot screen would output to the first card, in a PCIe x1 slot, while X would output to the first card in a PCIe x16 slot. Try all the cards on your mobo connected to PCIe x16 slots. Ctrl-Alt-F1 worked for me even on the first card, though, our problems may not be the same.

[abracadabra]

Have just setup BAMT on a rig. Works great except for one thing.
Mining doesn't start up on a bootup.  I have to type in /etc/init.d/mine restart after a boot.
Shouldn't mining start up automajically?

[BinaryMage]

Slight bump on my earlier question. 3 of my 5 cards (5870s) are mining at only about 50% load in BAMT. CPU usage shows 1 core maxed, the other unused. (C2D E8500) All GPUs have been tested and work @ 100% load with Ubuntu 11.04/Phoenix/phatk2. Seems to me like BAMT is only using one core of the CPU - how do I configure it to use both? (I looked on the wiki & searched the forums, both returned nothing)

[jamesg]

Looks like the latest version of phoenix is now compatible with p2pool. Is there anyone who would like to take on the challenge of creating an upgrade package for BAMT?

I will pay you in BTC to do it.

[lodcrappo]

Looks like the latest version of phoenix is now compatible with p2pool. Is there anyone who would like to take on the challenge of creating an upgrade package for BAMT?

I will pay you in BTC to do it.

This is not a simple task.  The phoenix we use in BAMT has many custom changes that must be ported to the new version.

I have considered doing the work, but would be delighted if someone else wants to take charge here.

[jamesg]

This is not a simple task.  The phoenix we use in BAMT has many custom changes that must be ported to the new version.

I have considered doing the work, but would be delighted if someone else wants to take charge here.

lodcrappo, what kind of btc would it take for you to do this. I am assuming you already have all of the source somewhere outside of the img of the OS. What would you like to get paid to do this work?

[lodcrappo]

This is not a simple task.  The phoenix we use in BAMT has many custom changes that must be ported to the new version.

I have considered doing the work, but would be delighted if someone else wants to take charge here.

lodcrappo, what kind of btc would it take for you to do this. I am assuming you already have all of the source somewhere outside of the img of the OS. What would you like to get paid to do this work?

I'll do it for "free".  Somebody made a huge donation recently and I feel guilty.

However, it will be a while, and I'd really like to help someone else do this rather than do it myself, because I'd really like to find someone that can maintain BAMT as it deserves.

As for the source, it is entirely available right in the BAMT image (all source for all BAMT tools and changes is in the image itself).   The BAMT scripts are all just perl, and phoenix is just python, so they are provided in source form by their very nature.

edit - BTW if instead of paying me, you would pay someone else to learn how to do this from me, that would be very cool

[jamesg]

I'll do it for "free".  Somebody made a huge donation recently and I feel guilty.

However, it will be a while, and I'd really like to help someone else do this rather than do it myself, because I'd really like to find someone that can maintain BAMT as it deserves.

As for the source, it is entirely available right in the BAMT image (all source for all BAMT tools and changes is in the image itself).   The BAMT scripts are all just perl, and phoenix is just python, so they are provided in source form by their very nature.

edit - BTW if instead of paying me, you would pay someone else to learn how to do this from me, that would be very cool

Awesome on the donation!!! There have been a couple of threads lately where BAMT has been mentioned.

I was hoping you had the source for the different parts of the mining code in a repository somewhere and some kind of build process for including it into an image of the OS.

I'll pledge to donate 10 bitcoins to see phoenix upgraded with a new patch released. I also pledge to keep evangelizing BAMT every opportunity I get so that you continue to receive donations for your work.

[lodcrappo]

I was hoping you had the source for the different parts of the mining code in a repository somewhere and some kind of build process for including it into an image of the OS.

Sorry no, but all of the source is in every image, as I mentioned.   Creating a package that can be deployed to any Debian or debian-like system would not be terribly difficult.  A good project for someone that wants to start learning about how BAMT works.

I'll pledge to donate 10 bitcoins to see phoenix upgraded with a new patch released. I also pledge to keep evangelizing BAMT every opportunity I get so that you continue to receive donations for your work.

cool..  it is appreciated.  I think some wheels are slowly starting to turn again.
We really must find a new lead dev if BAMT is to stay useful, otherwise I fear it will slowly become outdated to the point of unusable.

[lodcrappo]

We have an updated website, same address

http://aaronwolfe.com/bamt/

It was so terribly ugly that I finally bit the bullet and applied some css from a template.
Also corrected a misleading section about web based farm tools.

[lodcrappo]

Also seeding.

I'm having an issue getting BAMT to run on my miner. (5x 5870 on a GA-EP45-UD3P) When I boot, it initially loads fine, but when I get to the part where it would normally load X, the screen just turns black. Ctrl-Alt-F1 out works, but it takes me to a terminal running post-mining scripts which I cannot Ctrl-C to end. (nor do they end on their own) Ctrl-Alt-F2/F3/etc do not work either, they just take me to a flashing underscore, and again Ctrl-C does nothing. Any advice?

For some reason the init scripts that setup mining are locking. 

The script that's hanging (most likely) is /etc/init.d/gdm.  There are a couple tweaks in there that call aticonfig to remake the x config at every boot (in case you've changed GPUs around, plugged the key into a new machine, etc).

The hang is almost certainly because when they tell aticonfig to detect your GPUs and generate the Xorg conf, aticonfig is hanging.   It does that a lot when the GPU hardware doesn't respond the way it expects.   You can't get terminals on the other screens because init hasn't gotten far enough along in the bootup yet (and it probably never will, since our mining init isn't going to exit and let it move to the next task).

So.. what to do?  Remove all but one gpu.  It will almost certainly work fine.  Add another, and so on until it hangs.  That is the GPU that is pissing off aticonfig.  Now figure out why

[lodcrappo]

I have a 8GB USB flash drive.
How does BAMT divide up the space?

Here is what it says when I do a "df" command

Code:

Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
aufs                   1016312    851912    112796  89% /
tmpfs                  1687352         0   1687352   0% /lib/init/rw
udev                   1682136       176   1681960   1% /dev
tmpfs                  1687352         4   1687348   1% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1               823024    798304     24720  97% /live/image
/dev/sda2              1016312    851912    112796  89% /live/cow
tmpfs                  1687352         0   1687352   0% /live
tmpfs                  1687352         4   1687348   1% /tmp
/dev/sda3                97897     39286     53556  43% /home

Is the "available" in bytes? Or kbyte?

try 'df -h' for a more human friendly output.

see the FAQ for answers to your questions about space.

[lodcrappo]

Also, has anyone else had file corruption happen when the do a cold reboot of a machine? I am not sure if I just have bad luck or if this is something to be expected. The USB key is fine, but needs a fresh bamt install before it works again. Any pointers in the area would be greatly appreciated.

I have been having the same problem. 2 exact motherboards, 2 exact USB keys, 2 exact power supplies. one has 2 X 5970 and one 5870 and the other has 1 X 5970 and one 5870...the one with the 2 cards is having a problem with the corrupt USB key, and I also have reimage it all the time.

The simple answer is don't reboot  Leave the thing alone and let it mine.  But, sometimes it is unavoidable.  It seems to have more to do with the brand of USB key than anything else, at least in my limited experience.  Some keys do like to take a crap more than others.

You can issue the command:  sync   to make sure everything is written to the card ok.  So a reasonable reboot command might be:   sync;coldreboot

Is there a way to keep an image of the USB key safe somewhere so when you need it you just reimage the USB key?

sure, just read the image from the usb key.  opposite of how you wrote it in the first place, using same tool but read instead of write.

a good first step for all bamt users is to download the image, boot up and run the fixer so you're up to date.  Now put the key back in whatever you used to create it and read the updated image.  that way you can deploy new rigs from a with pre-fixed image.  you can also read an image with the config all setup if you want.  You'll save yourself time in the long run.  Thats what bamt is all about.  For farms using centralized config, make an image with your update command already specified etc, all you have to do for a new rig is edit to grab it's specific config parts and bamt will do the rest.

[lodcrappo]

Slight bump on my earlier question. 3 of my 5 cards (5870s) are mining at only about 50% load in BAMT. CPU usage shows 1 core maxed, the other unused. (C2D E8500) All GPUs have been tested and work @ 100% load with Ubuntu 11.04/Phoenix/phatk2. Seems to me like BAMT is only using one core of the CPU - how do I configure it to use both? (I looked on the wiki & searched the forums, both returned nothing)

did you apply all the fixes?  Non-updated BAMT machines can have a bug where xscreensaver kicks in and steals your hash power.   Sounds sort of like this is what you have going on.

CPU use should be 0, or nearly 0, all the time.  If it is maxed, Bad Things are happening.
It's probably only maxing one core because only one process is going nuts.

If you did update already, try running top.  What does it say is using all your CPU time?