Hi folks,
this is the thread for announcing lolMiner-mnx for mining MinexCoin (MNX) based on the
Equihash 96/5 algorithm (
please do not confuse this with Zcash / BitcoinGolds Equihash 200/9).
I know that I have a newbie account, so for all of you afraid of catching a virus or other malware: Please wait for first reports or try it on an USB linux installation with your primary drives detached and thus without risk.
The miner is developed from scratch (I started it as a learning project) and thus still is in beta phase. If you have trouble with the miner or suggestions please report here below this post. I will be happy to maintain a list of frequently asked features and most pressing bugs and will provide regular updates.
New Version v 0.11 (Feb 13)Here you can download the software:
For Windows click
here (Version 0.11)For Linux click
here (Version 0.11) Note: the Windows version was very untested before the first release and has some stability issues (see below). So if it runs on your system (can currently not be guarantied) please monitor the miner a while before leaving it unattended. For stable mining currently the combination Linux and Nvidia graphics is the best tested and most stable (and it is very fast, too). At the current time
prefer Linux over Windows version if possible.
Version history:v 0.11 beta:Added a new command line parameter "--enable-nv-hotfix".The parameter will reduce the required CPU utilization on Nvidia graphic cards. If you required 100 + x% CPU utilization (so one full core and parts of a second) it is likely that now you will need 10-15% + x. I can not get rid of the x because this is for checking if the solution is below the target. On my 2.1 ghz CPU with a GTX 1080 attached CPU utilization went down from 115% to ~20%.
This will also help running multiple instances for large rigs. Unfortunately one will loose about 1-2% of mining speed on Nvidia hardware when enabling the switch. Therefore - and because the loss may be even larger for other vendors - the hotfix has to be enabled by command line for each instance.
Added an automatic reconnect when the connection is broken.When a share is submitted and there is no acceptance message by the pool for the next 10 seconds the miner will reconnect to the pool in order to get back a stable connection. This helps the miner not to hang.
v 0.1 beta:Initial release for Linux and Windows
Usage:If you run the miner without any parameters or only by specifying the device it will run in an benchmark mode for one minute and display the current hash-rate.
To see all commands understood by lolMiner-mnx run it with -h or --help as only parameter.
For normal use the usage is very generic:
./lolMiner --server <pool address> --port <pool port> --user <your username>.<your worker name> --pass <your password on pool>(defaulted to “x”)
For all Nvidia miners:The default OpenCL behavior of Nvidia drivers cause a very high CPU load that can make it impossible to run the miner in multiple instances for a large rig. Add "--enable-nv-hotfix" to reduce the CPU load (and the hash-rate by about 1%) in order to reduce the CPU load.
There are always some questions regarding new software that I want to answer in a FAQ style. Here we go.
FAQIs this miner for CPU / GPU, and for which vendors?It can be run on any device that can execute OpenCL 1.1 code. So CPU (Intel / AMD) as well as GPU (Intel / Nvidia / AMD). We have to admit that our testing systems are mainly Intel CPU with Nvidia graphics machines, so this is the best tested situation.
What are the system requirements for lolMiner-mnx?You will need an 64 bit system running any Linux distribution or Windows 7 / 8 / 10.
Moreover the miner requires that an OpenCL driver for the devices you want to mine one is installed on your system.
The memory required for the OpenCL device depends on the device since the miner tries to utilize the device as good as possible. The maximum on device memory that was used by the miner by now is approximately 450 MB.
What hashrate can I expect from device x?This massively depends on OS, driver, the hardware itself. Here are some numbers from our testing systems that we collected when testing the miner. If you run it successfully please report in this thread so we can extend the list.
Intel Core I5-6200U Notebook CPU (2C / 4T):Ubuntu 16.04:
~ 210 sol/sWindows 7:
~ 215 sol/s (but hash-rate more volatile then under Linux due to power management)
Intel HD Graphic 520 Notebook GPUWindows 7:
~ 410 sol/s*AMD Radeon 5770 (800 cores / 850 mhz):Ubuntu 16.04 with LLVM mesa 17.2.4 open source drivers:
~795 sol/s*AMD Kaveri A10 7850K Integrated GPU (512 cores / 600 mhz / 8GB DDR3 1866):Ubuntu 17.10 with LLVM mesa 17.3.3 open source drivers:
~810 sol/s* Windows 10 with AMD Adrenaline Edition 17.12.1 drivers:
~950 sol/s* Nvidia GTX 745 (Maxwell, 384 cores / 1058 mhz / 4gb DDR3)Ubuntu 16.04 with Cuda 9.1.83:
~ 1840 sol/sNvidia GTX 1080 (Pascal, 2560 cores / 1607 mhz / 8gb GDDR5X)Red Hat Linux Server with Cuda 8.0.0:
~13200 sol/s*With parallel graphics output of the OS running
Is there any load intensity setting in lolMiner-mnx yet?Well no. The miner will always mine as fast as possible. So if you want to stress your device less or mine more power efficient then you should use your device drivers to underclock / undervolt / whatever. I may add a feature like this in the future, but I am not sure yet when and how I will do this because it is a lot of effort to make this possible for all OpenCL devices (I tried to use as few vendor-specific code as possible to make it run on as many systems as possible).
Can I run lolMiner-mnx on multiple GPUs?Yes and no. Currently each miner instance can handle only one OpenCL device, but you can select the device by adding --platform <number of desired OCL platform> and --device <number of device in platform> to the command line call. So you need one instance of the miner for every device. The support for running multiple devices over the same stratum connection is planned for one of the (near) future releases.
Is there a dev-fee on the software?Yes. At the current time the software has a dev-fee of 2%.
Are do the displayed sol/s include the fee?No, the miner displays in “what you see is what you get” style. You will only see the sol/s counting to your account and also only the share submits and accepts counting to your own bill.
Are there plans to lower the fee in the future? 2% is a bit much…Well is it when you consider that this one is build from scratch – which took two month, it is faster then optiminer on certain graphic cards (more then 60% on my stock 1080) and that minexcoin has a relatively low issue rate?
I will use the fee respectfully with regard to the people paying it, so be assured: One of the first invests will be in some more up to date hardware to test and develop lolMiner-mnx on a broad platform. Further hereby I promise: If the price of Minexcoin passes 50 dollars for more then two weeks or I complete an other miner for an other coin, I will release a version of the miner with lower fee.
Also I promise that when I decide to stop the active development of lolMiner I will clean up and release the sources.
Why are the binary packages so large?Well in fact the pure lolMiner-mnx binaries are small when I build it on my development system. In fact it is not much more then a stratum connector and some stuff for running the OpenCL code. But for the shipped version the Linux binary also includes all required libraries (boost, libstdc++…) except for the OpenCL library to make it just run out of the box.
On Windows the situation is different. I build the Windows binary under Linux using a cross compiler, so the miner ships with all the libraries that are required to run this g++ code on a Windows based system.
Overall the size is just this way to ensure everything needed is on board.
Known issues:[ALL OS, NVIDIA] High CPU Utilization (Found by me, Confirmed by all NVidia Users here)Reason:Nvidia has a busy wait for OpenCL kernel completion thats considered a but for over 6 years now, but is not yet fixed (in CUDA it is...)
Problem for Miners: High CPU utilization that may cause problems with CPU cooling. Also dropping hashrate when too many instances are active on the same rig with week CPU and instances may crash. For example an Intel Celeron 3855u may only run one instance of lolMiner currently, Core I5 with 4 physical cores may run up to 3 GPU. More then 4 GPU are currently only stable with Intel Server CPU or AMD Threadripper.
Expected Time to Fix: Fixed with version v 0.11, see release notes.
Ps: You will always require a strong CPU for Minexcoin anyways, since the found solutions have to be put twice to SHA256 to compare it with the target. This is currently done on CPU and since the high end Nvidia cards can reach up to 20k sol/s this is not easy for the CPU. I expect that when properly fixed the above mentioned Celeron may handle 4-6 GPU but if you have a larger rig it would be better mining an other coin on the other GPUs or have a more potent CPU in the rig.
[ALL OS] At slow / unstable Internet connection sometimes lolMiner still submits shares but server does not accept them (Found by me, Confirmed by an offline friend of mine)Reason: Well - weak connection is always bad for mining. Often re-connect helps.
Problem for Miners: lolMiner does not detect this yet and thus sometimes computes but shares are not counted. So you can not leave the miner unattended.
Expected Time to Fix: Fixed with version v 0.11, see release notes.
[Windows / Official AMD drivers] Miner starts, but reports 0 sol/s or Miner does not start up with CL-compile error (Confirmed by me) Ps: I am confused... I could be certain that someone yesterday gave a Screenshot of this and reported it but now the post is gone. Why?
Reason: Unknown yet.
Problem for Miners: Can not mine.
Expected Time to Fix: I can reproduce the error (when using CPU part on my Kaveri machine), but do not know why this happens yet. Will require deeper investigation because it seems that the OpenCL code does not return what it should do (and what it does on other platforms...)
[Windows, Linux (?) / Official AMD drivers] Miner does not start up with CL-compile error (Found by me, Confirmed by qwep1 and ruckus_pro) Reason: Some problem with the OpenCL code for some AMD OCL drivers. It is unknown yet if this is also true for Linux version. Linux version with Open Source drivers is stable (but slower)
Problem for Miners: Can not mine.
Expected Time to Fix: I can reproduce the problem on some ages old machine at home. I will have a look into the issue later today and hope to get rid of this within next week.
[Windows] Random crash during execution (Reported by AAile, Confirmed by Aeon_)Reason I do not know yet. It may be that the Nvidia driver things that the App over-utilizes the card. Currently lolMiner has only a very few things done on CPU before the next iteration starts (because the SHA stuff is done in an other thread), so the pressure on the GPU is very high.
Problem for Miners: The miner can not leave the miner unattended.
Expected Time to Fix: I need more info about when this happens and why. I hope that I can get rid out of this with the CPU load fixes above. Else one countermeasure could be running an external demon that checks if the miner is still running and restart it when it does not. Also I consider inserting a parameter that lowers GPU utilization (but of cause this will cost hash-rate... maybe one finds a stable trade of). I thing at least 2 of this countermeasures will be implemented within next two weeks, hopefully earlier. But for a definite fix I have to find the exact reason first
What about Laptop mining? specs I5 7th gen processor , Nvidea Geforce 940Mx VGA.. is this specs enough to mine some XMR?