hashkill - testing bitcoin miner plugin

[colossus]

yeah i also forgot to mention it failed for me after a few hours as well, i've reverted to the previous version, there was no communication problem it just stated 0/mash.

[gat3way]

@bolapara: did you use the -D option?

We just tried hashkill on 5970 (which has the same cores as 5870) and speed was as expected: 620-630M/s at stock speeds. That is with -D applied

@mskwik The stale shares could indicate a problem (e.g bad BFI_INT replacement). What GPU do you have?


As a side note, I got ADL working and I can now correctly get GPU temperatures, activity percent and clocks. Wondering how to proceed with that thermal stuff: should I quit when a threshold is reached....or probably pause for a certain period....or completely disabling that GPU? Hmm...

[mskwik]

This was on a 5770.  Switched back to give the new version of Phoenix another try and it has submitted 700+ shares with none stale while using BFI_INT.  Can try it again if there's some way to get debug output or something to help, didn't get any extra errors or output (beyond the hashrate/stats) at all during the last run.

[gat3way]

OK, could you please run export GPU_DUMP_DEVICE_KERNEL=3, run hashkill on 5770 for  30-40 seconds and give me the bitcoin_Juniper.isa file generated? This way I can have a look if there is a replacement issue.

[Jaime Frontero]

phenomenal.

got it installed, and thought i'd run it solo to tweak and configure, before i hooked it up to a pool.  started it up thusly (with bitcoind running):

hashkill-gpu -p bitcoin <username>:<password>:127.0.0.1:8332 -a <username>

[hashkill] Version 0.2.4
[hashkill] Plugin 'bitcoin' loaded successfully
[hashkill] Found GPU device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. - Juniper
[hashkill] This plugin supports GPU acceleration.
[hashkill] Initialized hash indexes
[hashkill] Initialized thread mutexes
[hashkill] Spawned worker threads
[hashkill] Successfully connected and authorized at 127.0.0.1:8332
[hashkill] Compiling OpenCL kernel source (amd_bitcoin.cl)
[hashkill] Binary size: 349524
[hashkill] Doing BFI_INT magic...

Speed: 172 MHash/sec [cur: 22%] [proc: 1] [subm: 0] [stale: 0] [eff: 0%]
Speed: 173 MHash/sec [cur: 34%] [proc: 1] [subm: 0] [stale: 0] [eff: 0%]

...& etc.

running a Sapphire 5770 @ 960 GPUcore, 250 Mem, a bit overvolted.  temp at a pretty constant 64 C.  Catalyst 11.3, SDK 2.4.  on debian testing with the 2.6.32-5-amd64 kernel.

it feels very stable and smooth, with the desktop actually sort of usable.

with DiabloMiner (-f15 -w128 -z4 - which is apparently the sweet spot) i get very stable at 166 MH/sec, but an essentially unusable desktop.  using Hashkill, i can actually open and use a web browser.

i have a couple of questions...

1.) am i supposed to be getting 0% efficiency when mining solo?

2.) any settings recommendations for dedicated mining (i don't mind a much less usable desktop)?  getworks, etc.?

3.) does Hashkill roll over its text cache, or should i set my terminal to a non-infinite scrollback?  i don't want to fill up my tiny hard drive...

thank you very much!

[gat3way]

Never tried it solo in fact. Should test. -D option brings higher speed at the cost of less responsive desktop. The infinite progress indicator issue will be fixed soon, looks like I've forgotten to flush stdout

[xyzzy]

This is getting better -- with 1x5770 and 2x5850 (overclocked), I'm getting "up to 818 MHash/sec" (which is about what I expect), but it's only fully loading the cards every few seconds -- here's what it looks like if I hit Enter between each progress update:

Code:

[hashkill] Successfully connected and authorized at deepbit.net:8332
[hashkill] Compiling OpenCL kernel source (amd_bitcoin.cl)
[hashkill] Binary size: 348864
[hashkill] Doing BFI_INT magic...

Mining statistics...
Speed: 331 MHash/sec [cur: 23%] [proc: 6] [subm: 6] [stale: 0] [eff: 100%]              
Speed: 805 MHash/sec [cur: 79%] [proc: 6] [subm: 6] [stale: 0] [eff: 100%]    
Speed: 297 MHash/sec [cur: 100%] [proc: 7] [subm: 6] [stale: 0] [eff: 85%]    
Speed: 0 MHash/sec [cur: 100%] [proc: 7] [subm: 6] [stale: 0] [eff: 85%]    
[error] (ocl_bitcoin.c:810) Could not connect to the stats server: please check if the URL provided with --addopt is correct!
Speed: 0 MHash/sec [cur: 100%] [proc: 7] [subm: 6] [stale: 0] [eff: 85%]    
Speed: 222 MHash/sec [cur: 15%] [proc: 7] [subm: 7] [stale: 0] [eff: 100%]    
Speed: 809 MHash/sec [cur: 72%] [proc: 7] [subm: 7] [stale: 0] [eff: 100%]    
Speed: 402 MHash/sec [cur: 100%] [proc: 8] [subm: 7] [stale: 0] [eff: 87%]    
[error] (ocl_bitcoin.c:810) Could not connect to the stats server: please check if the URL provided with --addopt is correct!
Speed: 0 MHash/sec [cur: 100%] [proc: 8] [subm: 7] [stale: 0] [eff: 87%]    
Speed: 0 MHash/sec [cur: 100%] [proc: 8] [subm: 8] [stale: 0] [eff: 100%]    
Speed: 109 MHash/sec [cur: 7%] [proc: 8] [subm: 8] [stale: 0] [eff: 100%]    
[error] (ocl_bitcoin.c:810) Could not connect to the stats server: please check if the URL provided with --addopt is correct!
Speed: 818 MHash/sec [cur: 64%] [proc: 8] [subm: 8] [stale: 0] [eff: 100%]    
Speed: 507 MHash/sec [cur: 100%] [proc: 9] [subm: 8] [stale: 0] [eff: 88%]    
Speed: 0 MHash/sec [cur: 100%] [proc: 9] [subm: 8] [stale: 0] [eff: 88%]    
Speed: 0 MHash/sec [cur: 100%] [proc: 9] [subm: 8] [stale: 0] [eff: 88%]
[error] (ocl_bitcoin.c:810) Could not connect to the stats server: please check if the URL provided with --addopt is correct!
Speed: 16 MHash/sec [cur: 1%] [proc: 9] [subm: 8] [stale: 0] [eff: 88%]    
Speed: 801 MHash/sec [cur: 57%] [proc: 9] [subm: 8] [stale: 0] [eff: 88%]    
Speed: 616 MHash/sec [cur: 100%] [proc: 10] [subm: 8] [stale: 0] [eff: 80%]    
[error] (ocl_bitcoin.c:810) Could not connect to the stats server: please check if the URL provided with --addopt is correct!
Speed: 0 MHash/sec [cur: 100%] [proc: 10] [subm: 8] [stale: 0] [eff: 80%]   

If I run "aticonfig --adapter=all --odgc" manually (and repeatedly) while this is happening, I see that the GPU load is cycling between 90% and 0%, roughly in step with the output of the program.

This is with SDK 2.4, btw -- which I can't even use with poclbm normally, because it only manages to use one of my 3 GPUs (?!!)

[gat3way]

Yep, this is another thing I need to get done - with faster systems, the keyspace is exhausted faster than we can fetch getwork()'s. I have to perfect the queueing mechanism a bit. Noticed that while testing with 6990.

As a workaround, you can run separate instances against different devices by setting the COMPUTE environment variable to get best performance until I fix that.

[bolapara]

@bolapara: did you use the -D option?

Used -G4 -D

[gat3way]

@bolapara, with -G4 you are too much dependant on CPU and memory. With systems with multicore CPUs and lots of RAM that's OK, but I guess you'd be better off if you provide -G 2 (or no -G at all). -G4 requires about 700 MB of system memory on a single-GPU system and probably about 1GB with dual-GPU ones (sigh) and if you don't have them free, you can get into swap and generally fuck up overall performance quite a lot

Also, with -G4 it takes more time until all threads kick in and initial kernel compilation time is much slower as well. So you are likely to see peak results after ~20-30 seconds or even more with multi-GPU systems.

As a general rule, I'd advise you to stay off turning -G option (unless you are nvidia user with newer drivers where -G2 helps a lot). It has a significant meaning with some "fast" hash cracking plugins (e.g mysql-old), but it does not bring much benefits with bitcoin. You are likely just increasing your overall power consumption without any benefit.

[Jaime Frontero]

Never tried it solo in fact. Should test. -D option brings higher speed at the cost of less responsive desktop. The infinite progress indicator issue will be fixed soon, looks like I've forgotten to flush stdout

-D option feels less stable.  trying 3, 4 and 6, i get variance between two Mh rates in all three cases: 172 and 176.  mostly 172.  (-G is worthless to me: single-core Sempron 140 with 2 Gig RAM.)

i hope to see version 0.2.5 up soon - if you get stdout flushing, i'll make it the miner for my little, frankenputer pool miner.  and we'll see how it goes with my two solos (2x5870 and 2x5850).

thanks again!

[gat3way]

Yep, -D is indeed less stable. A very slight variance in desktop usage (e.g minimizing a window) can decrease performance a lot for some interval of time. It's just too flaky for normal desktop usage. This should be used only on dedicated systems.

[gat3way]

OK think I fixed the "fflush" problem. Also managed to integrate the ADL part: now we have some nice statistics about GPU temperature and utilization when you press ENTER key:



There is a user-defined temperature threshold (default:90) that causes the miner to disable the particular overheating GPU for 1 minute when reached. I guess better idea would be to increase fan speed (perfectly possible) but haven't done that yet.

getwork mechanism also improved for faster cards - well, unless you have >2.4GH/s total compute power  

The ADL monitoring does not depend on any new libraries, it's part of the Catalyst driver suite.

Need some more testing, will release it soon.

[bolapara]

@bolapara, with -G4 you are too much dependant on CPU and memory. With systems with multicore CPUs and lots of RAM that's OK, but I guess you'd be better off if you provide -G 2 (or no -G at all). -G4 requires about 700 MB of system memory on a single-GPU system and probably about 1GB with dual-GPU ones (sigh) and if you don't have them free, you can get into swap and generally fuck up overall performance quite a lot

Also, with -G4 it takes more time until all threads kick in and initial kernel compilation time is much slower as well. So you are likely to see peak results after ~20-30 seconds or even more with multi-GPU systems.

As a general rule, I'd advise you to stay off turning -G option (unless you are nvidia user with newer drivers where -G2 helps a lot). It has a significant meaning with some "fast" hash cracking plugins (e.g mysql-old), but it does not bring much benefits with bitcoin. You are likely just increasing your overall power consumption without any benefit.

OK, thanks.  For the record, I also tried no -G option and just -D and had the same results.

[Jaime Frontero]

OK think I fixed the "fflush" problem. Also managed to integrate the ADL part: now we have some nice statistics about GPU temperature and utilization when you press ENTER key:



There is a user-defined temperature threshold (default:90) that causes the miner to disable the particular overheating GPU for 1 minute when reached. I guess better idea would be to increase fan speed (perfectly possible) but haven't done that yet.

getwork mechanism also improved for faster cards - well, unless you have >2.4GH/s total compute power  

The ADL monitoring does not depend on any new libraries, it's part of the Catalyst driver suite.

Need some more testing, will release it soon.

awesome!

[Jaime Frontero]

oh say, gat3way - as long as you're online...

what's the upgrade procedure?

do i put the new one in the old directory, run install, and it overwrites everything?  or should i whack /usr/share/hashkill first?

[gat3way]

It overwrites, no need to delete.

[Jaime Frontero]

It overwrites, no need to delete.

thx.

[martok]

I can test this with 5970s but I don't like the idea of installing things into /usr/share or requiring root privs for anything. Can I configure to pull the kernels from /home/user/share or the like?

[Jaime Frontero]

I can test this with 5970s but I don't like the idea of installing things into /usr/share or requiring root privs for anything. Can I configure to pull the kernels from /home/user/share or the like?

make a new user with create/read rights to /usr/share?  it shouldn't screw with your main login, or with root.  then make everything in /hashkill executable for that user.