An (even more) optimized version of cpuminer (pooler's cpuminer, CPU-only)

[burnside]

Heads up all:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=93540.msg1532516#msg1532516

The 64-bit cpuminer 2.2.3 windows binary in the zip file on the OP has been tampered with.  Unless you specify the username/password in a specific way, it will ignore your settings and instead use built-in creds.

Cheers.

burside, thank you very much for letting me know. I must have uploaded the wrong binary for the 64-bit Windows version of the miner. That version was compiled for internal use only, and never intended for public distribution. On the up side, that default address would never have worked from the outside of the private network it referred to, and when mining in a pool people notice immediately if shares don't show up in their account, so the only problem this could have caused is that getting the binary to work was trickier because you had to use the --userpass option instead of --user and --pass.

Unfortunately I'm currently away, so I'm unable to recompile the binary, but luckily there's not much difference between 2.2.2 and 2.2.3 apart from the benchmark feature, so for the moment people can just download version 2.2.2, which on Windows should not be any slower.

Miners who are currently using the "wrong" 64-bit 2.2.3 binary with no issues need not downgrade. There is no risk that your shares go to the wrong server or account, it's just that when you first set the miner up it may be a bit trickier to get your credentials to work, as in that binary not all of the command-line options for setting the credentials work as expected.

Really glad it wasn't something more nefarious.  Thanks for the quick reply!

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[Benja]

I downloaded the 32-bit windows one, and got a trojan alert on open?!

[GIANNAT]

Strange try checking the md5sum

[debianlinux]

I downloaded the 32-bit windows one, and got a trojan alert on open?!

Most Windows AV trigger on the 32 bit minerd because it is often payload. That is, instead of doing due diligence and identifying the actual trojan code it simply identifies a legitimate program that is often placed onto the victim's machine by the actual and separate malicious code. That the 32 bit version will work (albeit not as efficiently) on a 64 bit platform means the script kiddies package the 32 bit minerd for broadcast, thus the 64 bit minerd doesn't cause false positives.

[markusvon]

This thread helped me out. Thanks happily running CGminer on my mac at around 20-22 kh/s.

My only newb question is, how much more difficult is it to use the gpu instead of the cpu? Its got a pretty basic ATI Radeon HD 4850 in it but I am sure that would get a little more than my cpu

Thoughts community?

[420]

This thread helped me out. Thanks happily running CGminer on my mac at around 20-22 kh/s.

My only newb question is, how much more difficult is it to use the gpu instead of the cpu? Its got a pretty basic ATI Radeon HD 4850 in it but I am sure that would get a little more than my cpu

Thoughts community?

https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin/wiki/Mining-hardware-comparison

[shivansps]

nevermind.

[Nemo1024]

I am the author of Windows GUI front-end Bitcoin Minters in Tray:
http://stanislavs.org/bitcoin-miners-in-tray-miner-gui-manager/
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=149442.0

I want to report two issues with cpuminer, which make it inconvenient to use with a front-end:
 - All of its output is written to stderr, and not stdout
 - It does not finish output of a line when a line is written to the stream.

The last problem is critical as all output from cpuminer is only dumped to the pipe in one go when the program stops and closes its streams. Thus the front-end cannot show the redirected output from the miner. This also interferes with the keep-alive feature of my front-end as it monitors the output from a miner to determine if a miner is still alive or if need to be restarted.

EDIT: Tested with 64-bit version as 32-bit Windows binary cannot be downloaded (either gets blocked or downloads incomplete).

[knite]

Searched the forums, couldn't find anything about an error I'm getting on compilation.

[cpuminer-2.2.3]$ ./configure CFLAGS="-O3"
checking build system type... Invalid configuration `x86_64-unknown-linux-': machine `x86_64-unknown-linux' not recognized

Same things happens if I run configure with no args.

The README says to run autogen.sh if building from the Github repo (which is where I got the source), but that file wasn't included in the tarball.

Anyone else encountering the same issue? I'm not sure how to modify config.sub or which alternate args to pass to configure to resolve this...

[pooler]

Searched the forums, couldn't find anything about an error I'm getting on compilation.

[cpuminer-2.2.3]$ ./configure CFLAGS="-O3"
checking build system type... Invalid configuration `x86_64-unknown-linux-': machine `x86_64-unknown-linux' not recognized

Same things happens if I run configure with no args.

What distro are you using? If Debian or Ubuntu (or some other derivative that uses APT), have you installed build-essential and automake?

Code:

$ sudo apt-get install automake build-essential libcurl4-openssl-dev

The README says to run autogen.sh if building from the Github repo (which is where I got the source), but that file wasn't included in the tarball.

You got the tarball from Github, not from the Github repo. You only need autogen.sh if you cloned the repository using git.

[knite]

What distro are you using? If Debian or Ubuntu (or some other derivative that uses APT), have you installed build-essential and automake?

Code:

$ sudo apt-get install automake build-essential libcurl4-openssl-dev

You got the tarball from Github, not from the Github repo. You only need autogen.sh if you cloned the repository using git.

Thanks for the quick reply! I eventually noticed that autogen was in the repo and started from a repo clone instead of the tarball. I got stuck on a different error when running configure, but adding the libcurl library (in my case, libcurl-devel.x86_64) did the trick.

[pekv2]

Heya pooler, long time. Any chance updating this for stratum? Thanks, bud.

[pooler]

Heya pooler, long time. Any chance updating this for stratum? Thanks, bud.

I've been thinking about it lately, but right now I am busy with more urgent projects.
I have just finished adding Stratum support to my pool, and now I am working on the new release of the Litecoin client.

By the way, if you have more than one miner it is still better to use a proxy for Stratum mining, because it minimizes bandwidth usage and reduces the load on pool servers.

Just remember that for Litecoin mining you have to use this fork of Slush's original proxy:
https://github.com/CryptoManiac/stratum-mining-proxy
Binary for Windows here (thanks to Balthazar).
You run the proxy with

Code:

miner_proxy -pa scrypt -o POOLURL -p POOLPORT

and then connect your miners to local port 8332 with your usual worker credentials.

[pekv2]

Heya pooler, long time. Any chance updating this for stratum? Thanks, bud.

I've been thinking about it lately, but right now I am busy with more urgent projects.
I have just finished adding Stratum support to my pool, and now I am working on the new release of the Litecoin client.

By the way, if you have more than one miner it is still better to use a proxy for Stratum mining, because it minimizes bandwidth usage and reduces the load on pool servers.

Just remember that for Litecoin mining you have to use this fork of Slush's original proxy:
https://github.com/CryptoManiac/stratum-mining-proxy
Binary for Windows here (thanks to Balthazar).
You run the proxy with

Code:

miner_proxy -pa scrypt -o POOLURL -p POOLPORT

and then connect your miners to local port 8332 with your usual worker credentials.

K, thanks for the important info. I will wait, and just mine normally with "pooler's cgminer", I'm on a VPN for my GPU miners using cgminer-2.11.3-win32, would using a proxy still apply to cgminer-2.11.3-win32?

[pooler]

K, thanks for the important info. I will wait, and just mine normally with "pooler's cgminer",

I suppose you mean "cpuminer".

I'm on a VPN for my GPU miners using cgminer-2.11.3-win32, would using a proxy still apply to cgminer-2.11.3-win32?

Recent versions of cgminer already support Stratum natively. Using a proxy would still reduce bandwidth usage and server load, but if you don't have that many miners it's easier to just connect directly to pools, especially since this allows you to easily set backup pools.

[pekv2]

K, thanks for the important info. I will wait, and just mine normally with "pooler's cgminer",

I suppose you mean "cpuminer".

I'm on a VPN for my GPU miners using cgminer-2.11.3-win32, would using a proxy still apply to cgminer-2.11.3-win32?

Recent versions of cgminer already support Stratum natively. Using a proxy would still reduce bandwidth usage and server load, but if you don't have that many miners it's easier to just connect directly to pools, especially since this allows you to easily set backup pools.

Ops , mybad, yes, cpuminer "which mines the best imo", no insult intended, my apologies.

As far as part two of you post, fantastic. Just for the pools sake, I fired up my proxifier last night, mining off a proxy with proxifier with cpuminer and cgminer pointed to it. Once again thank you, pooler for the info.

Yea, I'd rather use the proxy anyhow, cut off my iSP, as I hear many ISP's were cutting ppl off thinking their PC's were infected or in some sort of this problem, this is the reason why I was mining on a vpn, so my ISP does not cut me, thinking I am infected.

[lucb1e]

Compiled the miner for ARMv71 (armel) for Debian Squeeze, runs on my Galaxy Note II (got Debian on via an app "Linux Deploy") at about 1.05KHash/s. It's not fast, but it the offline benchmark works Can't test with a pool yet; don't have internet on my phone right now.
The only dependency I had trouble with was libcurl7.10+, compiled this from sources too. Might also be in the repos if you know what to look for, I didn't really check. An apt-get upgrade simply didn't do the trick, so I went on and grabbed the latest stable source version.

Anyone interested in the binaries? It wasn't very hard to compile though, you could quite easily do it yourself if you want to (many kudos to pooler for this!).

Edit: Actually it runs around 3.5 - 4.1khash/s when the device is "awake" (screen on as far as I know, it's not the same but I don't know the exact meaning of the term in this context). Also USB charging is not sufficient, the battery goes down slowly (about 1% per ~10 minutes in initial tests), make sure you attach it to the wall outlet or that you pause mining every now and then. Without charging the battery doesn't hold up very long of course (perhaps 5 hours or so, I hardly tested this).

It seems that when the device doesn't consider itself awake, it limits processes to one core (or perhaps all processes). Great for battery conservation, less great for mining. (Also power saving limits cores to ~75% usage it seems, so might be good if you're USB charging and somehow manage to keep the device awake and have to power the screen.)

[lucb1e]

TL;DR:
Download minerd: http://g2f.nl/0w8qwc6 (90KB, armv71/armel/latest debian)
Tested, I mined 0.012LTC with it last night (~6hrs, but with power saving enabled; stupid me).

Did some more testing now. You really need to keep the device awake if you want this to be of any use (a quick google search reveals that apps such as "wakey" can do this). If it just went to sleep, processing is limited to one core. When it's deeply asleep, it even limits the cores to about 1/3rd-1/4th of their power. But as I said, just keep the device awake and problem solved. During the night you can get an easy 6hrs of mining, which would amount to about 0.02LTC, given that it's powering from a wall socket and awake the whole time. I let it sleep and got about 0.012LTC.

More testing would be needed to see if it works on other devices as well as on mine, but here is the minerd binary that works on my setup:
http://g2f.nl/0w8qwc6.minerd (90KB, armv71/armel/latest debian)

I haven't tested it besides my own phone, it may not work or have weird dependencies. Here are approximate steps to reproduce:
1. Install the app Linux Deploy. I installed the latest debian, did an apt-get update;apt-get upgrade;, then edited /etc/apt/sources.list, changed squeeze to wheezy, and performed an apt-get dist-upgrade. Not sure if this is needed, installing Linux Deploy itself may be good enough.

2. apt-get install build-essential
And possibly some other things, I installed lots of packages already.

3. Either find an up to date version of curl, or use this one: http://g2f.nl/0c87mi4.tar.gz
If you use mine, continue. If not, continue to step 10.

4. tar xf curl<tab>

5. cd curl<tab>

6. ./configure

7. make

8. make install

9. ln -s /usr/local/lib/libcurl.so.4 /usr/lib/libcurl.so.4
This is a hotfix that worked for me. I think I should have run the ./configure from step 6 with --prefix=something, but this was quicker.

10. Get the cpuminer sources.

11. tar xf cpuminer or whatever

12. cd cpuminer

13. vim configure
I don't remember what I did here exactly, but when running configure it told me that my CPU was unsupported. I don't know why the fuck this check is in when it compiles just fine, but you need to remove it from the configure file. I like to use vim, but you are free to use whatever editor you like of course.

14. Search in the file for arm and add armv71 somewhere in line with the others (I think you need to add a | (pipe character) too).
If this doesn't work, comment out the place where it errors and exits with an 'unsupported cpu'-like error. If that still doesn't work, ask me and I'll look it up.

15. ./configure

16. make

17. make install

18. ./minerd should work now

If you have any trouble, don't hesitate to send me a PM with the issue! I won't be checking this topic a lot, but I will reply in this topic with a quote from your PM (so that others can read and use it as well).

PS. I tried setting CFLAGS='-O3' or whatever the command for better optimization was, but this didn't improve mining speed for me. That doesn't mean it won't help for you, so you can try this if you want.

[K1773R]

PS. I tried setting CFLAGS='-O3' or whatever the command for better optimization was, but this didn't improve mining speed for me. That doesn't mean it won't help for you, so you can try this if you want.

this wont help since this is an ASM miner.

[CaptChadd]

I have an AMD FX 6300 at 3.8 GHz and I am getting 40 kh/s using all 6 cores.

I have a Dark Rock Pro 2 cooler, so I can barely even hear if my PC is still switched on it is that quiet lol.