(OLD) BFGMiner: modular FPGA/GPU, GBT, Stratum, RPC, Avalon/Lnx/OpnWrt/PPA/W64

[hashking]

When I run bfgminer on windows 7 64 with my single I get Icarus Detect: Failed to open bitforce://./COM4.   Can anyone help me on this.

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[Epoch]

When I run bfgminer on windows 7 64 with my single I get Icarus Detect: Failed to open bitforce://./COM4.   Can anyone help me on this.

Hashking, Have you ever had any version of cgminer or bfgminer working with your Singles previously?

Does EasyMiner (http://www.butterflylabs.com/drivers/) show your Single on COM4?

If not, you may not have the FTDI virtual COM port driver installed. You can nab them here: http://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/VCP.htm

If you are running GPU's along with your Single in the same instance of cgminer, you might want to try running separate instances of cgminer: once instance for your GPUs and a separate instance for your Single(s).

You might also try simplifying your command line to '-S COM4' instead of '-S bitforce://./COM4'; I am running cgminer 2.3.6, 2.4.1, and 2.4.2 on Win7/64 machines with ONLY Singles (no GPUs) and I've never had to specify 'bitforce:' on my command line. Also, the long-hand form of '//./COM4' is only required for COMxx ports where 'xx' is '10' or higher.

That's all I can think of for now. Tell us more.

[hashking]

When I run bfgminer on windows 7 64 with my single I get Icarus Detect: Failed to open bitforce://./COM4.   Can anyone help me on this.

Hashking, Have you ever had any version of cgminer or bfgminer working with your Singles previously?

Does EasyMiner (http://www.butterflylabs.com/drivers/) show your Single on COM4?

If not, you may not have the FTDI virtual COM port driver installed. You can nab them here: http://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/VCP.htm

If you are running GPU's along with your Single in the same instance of cgminer, you might want to try running separate instances of cgminer: once instance for your GPUs and a separate instance for your Single(s).

You might also try simplifying your command line to '-S COM4' instead of '-S bitforce://./COM4'; I am running cgminer 2.3.6, 2.4.1, and 2.4.2 on Win7/64 machines with ONLY Singles (no GPUs) and I've never had to specify 'bitforce:' on my command line. Also, the long-hand form of '//./COM4' is only required for COMxx ports where 'xx' is '10' or higher.

That's all I can think of for now. Tell us more.

First time running any version of cgminer on these singles.  In easy miner I'm showing COM4 and I did install the driver.  Not sure what else to try.

[Epoch]

When I run bfgminer on windows 7 64 with my single I get Icarus Detect: Failed to open bitforce://./COM4.   Can anyone help me on this.

Hashking, Have you ever had any version of cgminer or bfgminer working with your Singles previously?

Does EasyMiner (http://www.butterflylabs.com/drivers/) show your Single on COM4?

If not, you may not have the FTDI virtual COM port driver installed. You can nab them here: http://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/VCP.htm

If you are running GPU's along with your Single in the same instance of cgminer, you might want to try running separate instances of cgminer: one instance for your GPUs and a separate instance for your Single(s).

You might also try simplifying your command line to '-S COM4' instead of '-S bitforce://./COM4'; I am running cgminer 2.3.6, 2.4.1, and 2.4.2 on Win7/64 machines with ONLY Singles (no GPUs) and I've never had to specify 'bitforce:' on my command line. Also, the long-hand form of '//./COM4' is only required for COMxx ports where 'xx' is '10' or higher.

That's all I can think of for now. Tell us more.

First time running any version of cgminer on these singles.  In easy miner I'm showing COM4 and I did install the driver.  Not sure what else to try.

Try running with GPUs and Singles split out. Or to simply test: remove your GPUs from the command line and run cgminer/bfgminer ONLY with the Singles. If that works, you can then run a separate instance with ONLY your GPUs.

[Luke-Jr]

When I run bfgminer on windows 7 64 with my single I get Icarus Detect: Failed to open bitforce://./COM4.   Can anyone help me on this.

You can ignore this mis-error. Also, the slashes should be backslashes. It will be fixed in the upcoming release.

[Luke-Jr]

NEW VERSION - 2.4.3, JUNE 14 2012

This release cycle, things went mostly smooth with getting (new) things into CGMiner. Con doesn't want anything to do with CPU mining (I think he's planning to remove it completely from CGMiner), so some CPU mining improvements I made are BFGMiner-specific.

ButterFlyLabs is supposed to be getting me some updated protocol docs for their MiniRigs like 2 days ago, but it's still not ready apparently, so I put in a stop-gap minimal change to get BFGMiner at least working on them, if not as ideal as they will when BFL gets me the new stuff (I offered the change to Con for CGMiner, but he prefers to wait until we have the "real deal" ready to go).

ModMiner support got into CGMiner, but Kano made a mess of it when he added it to the RPC API; I cleaned it up in BFGMiner, so you can see the independent temperature and clock frequency of each of the 4 FPGA boards on the device. The problems cablepair was having with CGMiner on Windows seem to be a hardware issue with his prototype and shouldn't affect the production units.

There were some reports of problems with Windows not liking many failed openings of invalid devices, so Kano cleaned up the driver selection part of --scan-serial (that is, where you can put "drivername:" in front of it to only try that driver); unfortuantely, he insisted on changing it to "TLA:" instead of the driver name, and Con threw the whole thing out because he wouldn't leave it backward compatible. In the meantime, I've got the actual improvement part of Kano's change in BFGMiner, so it should work if you had that problem.

Finally, after giving it more thought, I decided to drop the CPU/GPU/PGA acronyms in favour of CPU/OCL (for OpenCL)/BFL/ICA/MMQ/ZTX. Since BFL is coming out with ASICs soon, probably using the same driver, and OpenCL might very well not be a GPU, it doesn't really make sense to assume they are.

Human readable changelog:

• Protocol acronyms replace device-type
• Basic BFL MiniRig support
• CPU mining improvements
• Mod miner FPGA support.
• Fixes for load balance and rotate pool strategies
• GPU engine speed changes - will not increase GPU speed if the fanspeed is above the maximum.
• Improvements in detecting lagging pools
• Lots of other minor fixes

Full changelog

• Change device API "name" to reflect driver name abbreviation instead of device type name
• miner.php allow a separate user settings file
• modminer: Implement extended device stats to expose each Board to the RPC API
• Bugfix: Use new cgpu->thr for longpoll waking
• bitforce: Remove 4.5s delay before polling starts, since MiniRig finishes sooner
• FPGA - allow device detect override without an open failure
• Bugfix: Missing printf value in merge from cgminer
• Ensure C compiler is in C99 mode
• Add CPU core count detection for BSD/Mac
• Set CPU mining idle priority on Windows
• can_roll and should_roll should have no bearing on the cycle period within the miner_thread so remove it.
• Check for strategy being changed to load balance when enabling LPs.
• Check that all threads on the device that called get_work are waiting on getwork before considering the pool lagging.
• Iterate over each thread belonging to each device in the hashmeter instead of searching for them now that they're a list.
• When using rotate pool strategy, ensure we only select from alive enabled pools.
• Start longpoll from every pool when load balance strategy is in use.
• Add mandatory and block fields to the work struct. Flag any shares that are detected as blocks as mandatory to submit, along with longpoll work from a previously rejecting pool.
• Consider the fan optimal if fanspeed is dropping but within the optimal speed window.
• Fix typo in some API messages (succeess/success)
• api.c MMQ stat bugs
• Bugfix: Fix warnings when built without libudev support
• Bugfix: slay a variety of warnings
• Bugfix: modminer: Fix unsigned/signed comparison and similar warnings
• API add ModMinerQuad support
• Bugfix: Honour forceauto parameter in serial_detect functions
• modminer: Temperature sensor improvements
• modminer: Make log messages more consistent in format
• Only adjust GPU speed up if the fanspeed is within the normal fanrange and hasn't been turned to maximum speed under overheat conditions.
• ModMiner use valid .name
• New driver: BTCFPGA ModMiner
• Abstract generally useful FPGA code into fpgautils.c
• API add stats for pool getworks
• miner.php option to hide specific fields from the display
• miner.php add version numbers to the summary page
• Update debian configs to v2.4.2
• Add API and FPGA READMEs into Makefile to be included in source distribution.
• Icarus - fix unit64_t printf warnings

[cablepair]

THE BFG LIVES!

[P_Shep]

that's a chaingun.

[riclas]

I am having some issues with BTCMiner from Ztex and so I tried bfgminer on Windows 7.
I followed Nelisky's instructions to change the libusb driver to WinUSB but the miner does not find the fpga:

[2012-06-19 20:16:24] Ztex check device: Failed to read ztex descriptor with err -9
[2012-06-19 20:16:24] prepare device: -9

Has anyone been able to run Ztex 1.15y fpga on bfgminer for windows?

[Chefnet]

do the bfgminer also need the opencl.dll (ati sdk) or can it be used without?

[Luke-Jr]

do the bfgminer also need the opencl.dll (ati sdk) or can it be used without?

It needs OpenCL.dll if you want to use the OpenCL driver, but not otherwise.

[Fiyasko]

that's a chaingun.

Woah dude. BFG stands for BIG _______ ___

[P_Shep]

that's a chaingun.

Woah dude. BFG stands for BIG _______ ___

Fully aware, however the picture above is not a BFG, it's a chaingun.

[norulezapply]

Any planned support for Cairnsmore1 boards when resources are available?

[Luke-Jr]

Any planned support for Cairnsmore1 boards when resources are available?

Enterpoint said they were going to send me one about a month ago for development, but I haven't heard back.

[wildemagic]

Luke, the default CGMiner errors on systems without the AMD sdk, I have no idea (or interest) how to re-compile without opencl.

From my understanding your BFGMiner doesnt require the sdk or opencl.dll to operate, is that correct?

Lastly, I use 4 icarus, is your version a better platform for them?

kind regards

[Diapolo]

that's a chaingun.

Sorry, but LOL :-D.

Dia

[Luke-Jr]

Luke, the default CGMiner errors on systems without the AMD sdk, I have no idea (or interest) how to re-compile without opencl.

From my understanding your BFGMiner doesnt require the sdk or opencl.dll to operate, is that correct?

Correct...

Lastly, I use 4 icarus, is your version a better platform for them?

Yes, there are numerous improvements in BFGMiner for Icarus:

• On some systems, Icarus will stop communicating until it is reopened. BFGMiner has a simple workaround by reopening it while it's busy hashing away. (CGMiner will just silently stop mining on it)
• BFGMiner uses out-of-order hash searching for Icarus - this minimizes the time period during which Icarus might lose hashes
• BFGMiner uses epoll (on Linux) for longpolling, which provides better reaction time and thus fewer stales

[wildemagic]

Thanks for your reply Luke.

Ive used CGMiner pretty successfully so far, but I have some small imbedded systems I want to test the icarus on and opencl or sdk support isnt possible.

I like the idea of better icarus support, so ill give it a try.

[update] : Switched to BFGMiner 2.4.3 from CGMiner 2.4.3 with same switches, BFG stops working after 1-5mins with windows saying the program has stopped responding.
This is on my win7x32 system with e350.  Ill try on my intel p3 when I get it setup, but so far a bit disappointing that it didnt work out of the box.  
I Have used the last 3 versions of CGMiner no problems.

[update2] : Used administrator access privs to run the exe, seems to have fixed the issue.

[update3] : Still crashing.  Switching back to CGMiner until I can try this on my intel+no ocl platform.

kind regards

[-ck]

Thanks for your reply Luke.

Ive used CGMiner pretty successfully so far, but I have some small imbedded systems I want to test the icarus on and opencl or sdk support isnt possible.

I like the idea of better icarus support, so ill give it a try.

[update] : Switched to BFGMiner 2.4.3 from CGMiner 2.4.3 with same switches, BFG stops working after 1-5mins with windows saying the program has stopped responding.
This is on my win7x32 system with e350.  Ill try on my intel p3 when I get it setup, but so far a bit disappointing that it didnt work out of the box.  
I Have used the last 3 versions of CGMiner no problems.

[update2] : Used administrator access privs to run the exe, seems to have fixed the issue.

[update3] : Still crashing.  Switching back to CGMiner until I can try this on my intel+no ocl platform.

kind regards

Here is what Kano had to say about the whole icarus code issue which is one of the issues that caused the fork in the first place:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=28402.msg997424#msg997424