Hacking The KNC Firmware: Overclocking

[padrino]

I followed suggestions from another venue about recompiling modified source code.

The bar is higher than editing a script and running it currently.

The RESULTS for me are less than ideal to date so I don't elaborate here.
WIthout cooling and power improvements, not much there to get.

If I were helpful like you are,
explained monster heatsink in this thread,
with pictures,
I could start checking for messages,
yesterday.

It's in this thread is also a cruel correct answer.

It's cryptic tidbit time! Fun with powers of 2.

Code:

root@Neptune:~# cat /var/run/.waas_curfreq 
-1 -1 -1 -1 512 512 528 512 512 512 544 512 512 512 544 512 512 512 512 512 512 512 512 512

False is a possibility too.
(BTW I claim it's real)
Don't assume nuthin!

Thanks to KnCMiner,
It's open source,
legal yet fun!

YMMV

This is interesting if it actually works, you have always been able to set whatever you want but waas itself is closed source in the Nov Jupiters, while you can pass it anything you like it will not actually honor the settings.. I can't imagine they open sourced the code for waas itself for the Neptune but if they did then it's an easy fix..

On my firmware I need to set things manually by flipping bits because it's out of the range of waas, I actually intercept the speed (if anyone has looked at the code) and if waas can handle it I let it, anything over the Octover and November waas ranges automatically gets set by flipping bits..

In any case if they now allow waas to do it directly it will be much easier..

[Elenelen]

OK, thanks for the info... I will need to study more, and back to the drawing board.....

I  DID send you (unsolicited) detailed instructions via "Message" yesterday.
Please forgive me for bieng so bold but,
I think you are the closest to success.

@ Others,
I don't make a habit of it (messages or mentioning same in threads)
When it's ready it is trivial to educate/distribute widely.
I don't want to participate in cooking cubes of the unprepared miner that WILL click anything for 0.0001 more GH.

Full disclosure
I invited Elenelen to distribute when ready also, no caveats, no secrets, no leetness involved.

Anyone can do it now, few are motivated to go thru the hoops yet.

YMMV

OOPS !!  I didn't know I had messages waiting for me (11 of them, never noticed by me)..... such a newbie I am 

Thank you Tolip !   I will work on it.

[Elenelen]

By the way: anyone having a dumping CGminer or FW_1.0 ?  My system is stopping and restarting one to three times daily, this I didn't have with the previous rc9.
I wonder if I'm the only one?

This is what my 'cat /var/log/monitordcdc.log' is telling (it dumped and restarted on 08:14:18 after it ran in one go from 15:38:20 the day before):

[2014-07-13 15:38:20] Restarting cgminer
[2014-07-14 08:12:47] Die 5-3 came DOWN
[2014-07-14 08:13:09] waas re-run
[2014-07-14 08:13:55] Die 5-3 came UP
[2014-07-14 08:14:17] waas re-run

[tolip_wen]

This is interesting if it actually works, you have always been able to set whatever you want but waas itself is closed source in the Nov Jupiters, while you can pass it anything you like it will not actually honor the settings.. I can't imagine they open sourced the code for waas itself for the Neptune but if they did then it's an easy fix..

On my firmware I need to set things manually by flipping bits because it's out of the range of waas, I actually intercept the speed (if anyone has looked at the code) and if waas can handle it I let it, anything over the Octover and November waas ranges automatically gets set by flipping bits..

In any case if they now allow waas to do it directly it will be much easier..

hno (KnC Engineer) informed me recently that the FPGA rounds down incorrect clocks to next available.
FPGA code 'spimux.rbf' is the file it's in.

FPGA and ASIC are black box to me once you get on chip.

The 'power of 2 clocks' above would have been rounded down to next valid clock.
Drat

KnC has the keys in the FPGA code.

Oh well. still things to test.

There is a program called 'asic' that allows command line setting of various items including freq.

YMMV

[user27]

I'm working on cooling, but a friend beat me to it with the Novec 7100... Screenshot below showing comparison between stock cooling and evap. cooling/

He say's VRM's shut down from time to time at the voltage shown so confirmed 51A is the limit regardless of temps the OCP cuts in; he is running at 500 with one voltage setting above stock now without any problems.

[crashoveride54902]

I'm working on cooling, but a friend beat me to it with the Novec 7100... Screenshot below showing comparison between stock cooling and evap. cooling/

He say's VRM's shut down from time to time at the voltage shown so confirmed 51A is the limit regardless of temps the OCP cuts in; he is running at 500 with one voltage setting above stock now without any problems.

and you guys didn't believe me said it cpl times in here hehe

[tolip_wen]

I'm working on cooling, but a friend beat me to it with the Novec 7100... Screenshot below showing comparison between stock cooling and evap. cooling/

He say's VRM's shut down from time to time at the voltage shown so confirmed 51A is the limit regardless of temps the OCP cuts in; he is running at 500 with one voltage setting above stock now without any problems.

and you guys didn't believe me said it cpl times in here hehe

@ user27
Is the warmer ASIC with the cooler VRM the submerged one?
If so a small heatsink on the ASIC also submerged might help lower current.

@crashoveride
I agree's with ya.

It's why I adjusted volts in both directions to determine lowest current with my setup.
Clicking on Apply changes on advanced page does not typically sleep VRM.
It's a low impact test.

YMMV

[user27]

and you guys didn't believe me said it cpl times in here hehe

I did! Just confirming your findings match my friend's results.

@ user27
Is the warmer ASIC with the cooler VRM the submerged one?
If so a small heatsink on the ASIC also submerged might help lower current.

That's not how evap cooling works; the bath is at 60 degrees and as soon as anything gets above that the liquid boils carrying the heat away. Heat sinks go at the other end of the system to cool the water in the loop.

u27

[tolip_wen]

and you guys didn't believe me said it cpl times in here hehe

I did! Just confirming your findings match my friend's results.

@ user27
Is the warmer ASIC with the cooler VRM the submerged one?
If so a small heatsink on the ASIC also submerged might help lower current.

That's not how evap cooling works; the bath is at 60 degrees and as soon as anything gets above that the liquid boils carrying the heat away. Heat sinks go at the other end of the system to cool the water in the loop.

u27

Thx, I'm now slightly less ignorant on the subject.
Had I engaged brain, answer is in data.

Is that the stuff in the heat pipes on heatsinks?

Does it require pressure lid or just cooling to recapture?

Would be expensive fun to watch that stuff in traditional water cooling system.
Potential catastrophy and all.

More pics please please please

YMMV

[tolip_wen]

Some people mentioned swapping out the VRM to gain 20A per die.
Adding a single 40A per die would require 1/2 the total VRM and provide twice the gain 40A vs 20A.
$500 vs $1000 in VRM for whole Neptune.
Labor is similar for both options.
A reflow operator likely has both skilsets already.

Not as crazy as it sounds if you ignore huge cost.
Almost as easy to stack parts with traditional solder skills as replace huge SMD power components.
VRM addresses can go to 12 manually, they can be in gang up to 7 units per die.
The code already handles slaves, adding additional slave not too bad.

The only downside is then you won't get to sell
'pampered, only hashed on cool Sundays, used 40A VRM'
on ebay.

YMMV

[proclivity]

and you guys didn't believe me said it cpl times in here hehe

I did! Just confirming your findings match my friend's results.

@ user27
Is the warmer ASIC with the cooler VRM the submerged one?
If so a small heatsink on the ASIC also submerged might help lower current.

That's not how evap cooling works; the bath is at 60 degrees and as soon as anything gets above that the liquid boils carrying the heat away. Heat sinks go at the other end of the system to cool the water in the loop.

u27

Yes but.. Surface area is still relevent; greater surface area could boil (or convect) more fluid if there is enough heat to dissipate.

Regardless... Awesome work on this, very cool!

[user27]

Yes but.. Surface area is still relevent; greater surface area could boil (or convect) more fluid if there is enough heat to dissipate.

This stuff is so efficient that surface area would not come into play unless you're wanting to push something like (wildly guessing here) 1kW through a 25x25mm chip.

Is that the stuff in the heat pipes on heatsinks?

Similar in that it's a phase change system, yea; not sure on the specifics.

Does it require pressure lid or just cooling to recapture?

This is known as open bath so in theory no lid is required (but in practice an almost air tight lid is advisable); where water is 1kg per 1L Novec 7100 is about 1.35kg for 1L and the same goes for the gas once it evaporates it is much heavier than air. Once the layer of HFE gas is thick enough to reach the cooling it condenses and drips back down to replenish the bath.

Would be expensive fun to watch that stuff in traditional water cooling system.
Potential catastrophy and all.
More pics please please please
YMMV

His rig has seen some changes since, but I took these when I first got eyes on his test setup. Not really showing anything different to smracer video:

http://videobam.com/MduAt













EDIT:
Other VRM's eventually get much hotter and some clocks reduced to keep a handle on VRM temps; but the board in Novec can just be adjusted for max speed up to 51A(ish):


He needs to get the clocks running faster but neither he or I have any idea where to start; can we get a noobs guide to 525Mhz?

u27

[tolip_wen]

EDIT:
Other VRM's eventually get much hotter and some clocks reduced to keep a handle on VRM temps; but the board in Novec can just be adjusted for max speed up to 51A(ish):


He needs to get the clocks running faster but neither he or I have any idea where to start; can we get a noobs guide to 525Mhz?

u27

What is the viscosity of that stuff?

The stuff I posted earlier was a bit too optimistic.
(tolip opens mouth changes feet)
A part of the puzzle is complete but,,,

The FPGA quietly filters requests other than ones matching the stock Advanced page speeds.
It rounds down to next available freq.

That is a cool feature,
errors, (like the ones I introduced)
are fixed on the fly at next lowest speed.
It keeps kids like me hashin.

YMMV

[user27]

What is the viscosity of that stuff?

Very low, thinner than water I would say.

The stuff I posted earlier was a bit too optimistic.
(tolip opens mouth changes feet)
A part of the puzzle is complete but,,,
The FPGA quietly filters requests other than ones matching the stock Advanced page speeds.
It rounds down to next available freq.
That is a cool feature,
errors, (like the ones I introduced)
are fixed on the fly at next lowest speed.
It keeps kids like me hashin.
YMMV

So long story short; no overclocking?

ok

[tolip_wen]

So long story short; no overclocking?

ok

nope, no OC by me yet.

If one of my JTAG interfaces is compatable with Altera parts,,,
I'm going to try snooping the FPGA memory thru the JTAG interface.
Low probability of success but interesting.

There may be a way to get past the freq filtr in the FPGA with a raw ASIC request also.
Possibly with a corrctly crafted 'i2cset' command.

If you are just sitting waiting for others to do it,
assume it will not happen.

YMMV


EDIT
MY AVR Dragon (for OC of BFL) and Altera Byte Blaster are compatable with each other.
All I need to do is solder on a 2x5 connector to controller (Jp6).
Here is to hoping the JTAG is still enabled on FW 1.0.
Would not be my first dead end!

[user27]

If you are just sitting waiting for others to do it,
assume it will not happen.

YMMV

All sounds good, but I haven't even got cooling sorted on my Neptune yet... Can't really open my boxes up because it's still running with a dead die and I don't want to give KnC any excuses not to fix it.

No help from KnC as yet other than a link to the trouble shooting guide Kurt posted on their forum.

Even when I have it up and running properly and with halfway decent cooling I'm not sure what help I could offer?

u27

[tolip_wen]

No help from KnC as yet other than a link to the trouble shooting guide Kurt posted on their forum.

Even when I have it up and running properly and with halfway decent cooling I'm not sure what help I could offer?

u27

I have never dealt with a sleeping die. <-(HUGE DISCLAIMER)

If it is VRM related,
AND
the VRM can be awakened,

This might work
------------------------
Stop cgminer.

'/etc/init.d/cgminer.sh stop'

WAIT 20 seconds.

'waas'

WAIT 10-20 seconds AFTER it finishes

'/etc/init.d/cgminer.sh restart'

Give cgminer a minute to get going,
then look for results.

'waas -g all-asic-info | grep I'
--------------------------------------------
look for 2 low current VRM at sleeping die position in resulting list.
It might take 2-3 tries to get all VRM awake.
Supposedly there is a way that the VRM sleeps that needs power cycle to cure.
If this is true and it applies to you get an RMA ASAP!!!
I have never seen it, I have not power cycled in days.
I regularly sleep and awaken VRM with method above.

The above procedure is also needed if you apply changes to freq from Advanced page with FW 1.0.
It often results in sleeping VRM.

As usual
YMMV

[Elenelen]

By the way: anyone having a dumping CGminer or FW_1.0 ?  My system is stopping and restarting one to three times daily, this I didn't have with the previous rc9.
I wonder if I'm the only one?

This is what my 'cat /var/log/monitordcdc.log' is telling (it dumped and restarted on 08:14:18 after it ran in one go from 15:38:20 the day before):

[2014-07-13 15:38:20] Restarting cgminer
[2014-07-14 08:12:47] Die 5-3 came DOWN
[2014-07-14 08:13:09] waas re-run
[2014-07-14 08:13:55] Die 5-3 came UP
[2014-07-14 08:14:17] waas re-run

Coming back on this dumping-restarting:

During the past few days that I followed Tolip's instructions (to create a build environment and play with Waas-code), I noticed that not only the Webinterface-Status-page isn't working (expected) but Monitordcdc acts differently as well: it doesn't show the logging above, but instead: has hundreds of rows with only the text "starting" ..... and the nice thing: it did not dump-autorestart anymore (which is a good thing), and everything ran fine.

This morning I had a power-down Neptune, and restarted with default environment again: guess what: I have the same dumping described above, again!  So it's Monitordcdc in release-1.0 giving me the trouble (not present in rc9).

Does anyone have an idea, why the other build-environment changes this behavior?

[tolip_wen]

By the way: anyone having a dumping CGminer or FW_1.0 ?  My system is stopping and restarting one to three times daily, this I didn't have with the previous rc9.
I wonder if I'm the only one?

This is what my 'cat /var/log/monitordcdc.log' is telling (it dumped and restarted on 08:14:18 after it ran in one go from 15:38:20 the day before):

[2014-07-13 15:38:20] Restarting cgminer
[2014-07-14 08:12:47] Die 5-3 came DOWN
[2014-07-14 08:13:09] waas re-run
[2014-07-14 08:13:55] Die 5-3 came UP
[2014-07-14 08:14:17] waas re-run

Coming back on this dumping-restarting:

During the past few days that I followed Tolip's instructions (to create a build environment and play with Waas-code), I noticed that not only the Webinterface-Status-page isn't working (expected) but Monitordcdc acts differently as well: it doesn't show the logging above, but instead: has hundreds of rows with only the text "starting" ..... and the nice thing: it did not dump-autorestart anymore (which is a good thing), and everything ran fine.

This morning I had a power-down Neptune, and restarted with default environment again: guess what: I have the same dumping described above, again!  So it's Monitordcdc in release-1.0 giving me the trouble (not present in rc9).

Does anyone have an idea, why the other build-environment changes this behavior?

Another clue emerges!

With the build environ sleepers keep sleeping and monitordcdc ignores them.

I had about 40 hours of uninterrupted goodness from cgminer.
I did find 2 VRM sleeping today and did the stop, waas, restart thing.
cgminer was hashing away and log file nuthin but 'Start'

monitordcdc restarting cgminer is preferred to sleeping die requiring manual intervention.
Provided it brings them all back into production.

YMMV

[Elenelen]

By the way: anyone having a dumping CGminer or FW_1.0 ?  My system is stopping and restarting one to three times daily, this I didn't have with the previous rc9.
I wonder if I'm the only one?

This is what my 'cat /var/log/monitordcdc.log' is telling (it dumped and restarted on 08:14:18 after it ran in one go from 15:38:20 the day before):

[2014-07-13 15:38:20] Restarting cgminer
[2014-07-14 08:12:47] Die 5-3 came DOWN
[2014-07-14 08:13:09] waas re-run
[2014-07-14 08:13:55] Die 5-3 came UP
[2014-07-14 08:14:17] waas re-run

Coming back on this dumping-restarting:

During the past few days that I followed Tolip's instructions (to create a build environment and play with Waas-code), I noticed that not only the Webinterface-Status-page isn't working (expected) but Monitordcdc acts differently as well: it doesn't show the logging above, but instead: has hundreds of rows with only the text "starting" ..... and the nice thing: it did not dump-autorestart anymore (which is a good thing), and everything ran fine.

This morning I had a power-down Neptune, and restarted with default environment again: guess what: I have the same dumping described above, again!  So it's Monitordcdc in release-1.0 giving me the trouble (not present in rc9).

Does anyone have an idea, why the other build-environment changes this behavior?

Another clue emerges!

With the build environ sleepers keep sleeping and monitordcdc ignores them.

I had about 40 hours of uninterrupted goodness from cgminer.
I did find 2 VRM sleeping today and did the stop, waas, restart thing.
cgminer was hashing away and log file nuthin but 'Start'

monitordcdc restarting cgminer is preferred to sleeping die requiring manual intervention.
Provided it brings them all back into production.

YMMV

hmmm... but I didn't have any sleepers, just a lot of "Start" lines in the Log....

Do we have the source code of Monitordcdc ?  (I cannot find it in the git).
Edit: Oh... sorry... found it!