It's been a tough three days!
Day 1:So I worked with the bitmain guys just now on a workaround for the pool diff issue. Hopefully they'll post a fix for you to use. This should allow you to mine at other pools. While the hashrate will appear wrong when you first connect to them it should ramp up slowly to the correct value.
Not holding my breath! (Well yes, actually I most certainly am, and turning a bit blue in fact...)
Day 2:It turns out the controller is so low powered that it can only process ~30 shares per second which mean that unless diff is set higher, they work their way into a death spiral before diff catches up. Great...
[...] hopefully bring out new firmware with the changes I gave them.
From your mouth to God's ear.
Day 3:It's not a firmware issue. The controller hardware they bundle with it is not fast enough to handle running at low diffs, and most pools start at a lower diff for a while before vardiff pushes them up. If they stay low diff long enough the controller never catches up. I gave them a driver code workaround (i.e. hack) to get over this hurdle. It means they'll (appear to) run at low hashrates for a while until the pool reaches a diff suitable for the device. When they say it's a firmware issue, they mean they'll offer new firmware with an updated cgminer to address the issue.
Thanks for all this great information, for investigating the issue, for identifying the underlying cause, and most of all, thanks for fixing it! Thanks, in fact for
doing all of the stuff that Bitmain should be doing for its customers, for the money we paid to them. Can we be your customers now, too? You are so much more proactive at fixing your free software than they are, after bundling it with their
so not-free hardware!
I'm sure they will incorporate your free fix Real Soon Now
TM and fail spectacularly to recognize your contributions with appropriate financial renumerations, so in the meantime, time being money and all, Con Kolivas, would you consider hooking us up with this
hacked customized version of your Most Awesome cgminer, um you know -- directly? Don't be shy,
go ahead -- SELL ME a cgminer binary that includes a workaround for the S4's underpowered controller hardware! I (by which i mean me) and we (by which I mean the legions of other S4 owners gnashing their teeth in pain all night, right about now as i am) would be happy to pay for such free software, delivered in such a timely manner. Beat Bitmain to the punch and fix their hardware with a piece of improved software. Package it as as an elegantly pain-killing already-compiled drop-in binary replacement that
their your customers can simply wget on into place from an ssh shell session like the 4.6.0 for S3's (a so-called "firmware" update is not necessary, but for those not comfortable wget-ing and ssh-ing, a package could probably be built to ease their pain too, and should probably be priced just a
bit higher :-)
If you need anything, anything at all, like ssh access to an S4 such as my own, to use as a guinea pig rig, I am of course very eager to hook you up. Coffee? Adderall? A foot rub? Anything you need, mate! I have several fine quality first born children who are negotiable, as well!
Someone elsewhere said Bitmain should be paying you, and they should. We should also -- someone the hell should. Open Source software development is so often a thankless job, and *always* an underpaid one. So since I suspect you're one of those altruistic developers who are made a bit uncomfortable by the idea of selling a
hacked customized version of your wonderful open source gift to the world, I will repost this here, where so many of us owe you so many well-deserved thank$:
This code is provided entirely free of charge by the programmer in his spare
time so donations would be greatly appreciated. Please consider donating to the
address below.
Con Kolivas <
kernel@kolivas.org>
15qSxP1SQcUX3o4nhkfdbgyoWEFMomJ4rZ
I do confess that my donation is mostly thanks
in advance :-) I've shamelessly used your software for personal gain now for quite some time without donating a bitcent so yeah also as thanks
in arrears too for, you know, cgminer and ckpool and all that other stuff you do too, of course :-)
And --wait for it -- yes do you hear that? It's a growing, thundering, sound. From off in the distance... yes, it's a
stampede of other S4
Suckers Early Adopter like myself, all clamoring to thank you in advance for that fixed cgminer binary too, with their donations of much generous very btc wow paying it forward for open source (certainly not so their ROI may go forth to the moon) and cuz, dude, we know your time is valuable as well :-)
Hoping you get
paid motivated enough to build me a better cgminer soon!
-dave,
