Spartan6's on P2Pool using a RaspberryPi?

[wogaut]

I spent some time getting bitcoind to build on RaspberryPi. Here are my steps...

I'm using a Transcend 8GB SDHC Card (Class 10)

First I started with the Debian Wheezy test image from: http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=8071
On first boot it will run raspi-config. Here you will increase the size of your root partition, set the maximum RAM to the CPU, and enable SSH server.

Get build tools and deps:
sudo apt-get install build-essential autoconf pkg-config git libcurl4-openssl-dev libncurses5-dev libssl-dev libdb5.1++-dev libboost-all-dev

Adjust virtual memory:
sudo vi /etc/dphys-swapfile
Change:
CONF_SWAPSIZE=100
to:
CONF_SWAPSIZE=400
(I was getting an "g++: internal compiler error: Killed (program cc1plus)" with the default size)

sudo dphys-swapfile setup
sudo dphys-swapfile swapon

Get source and build bitcoind:
git clone https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin.git
cd bitcoin/
git branch -r
git checkout origin/0.6.2

cd src/
make -f makefile.unix

Go to dinner...

bitcoind seems to run fine on the RasPi.

Very cool, thank you!

[jaebird]

Just a quick update... initially it seemed that bitcoind was running great on the raspberry pi, however as the blockchain grew in length it appears to be slowing down. I tried copying the blockchain from my desktop but kept getting errors when launching. So I decided I'd had to get the blockchain from scratch. I'm running this way:

sudo dphys-swapfile swapoff
./bitcoind -listen=0 -checkblocks=10 -checklevel=0 &

I turned swap off to keep from thrashing the SD card. The system uses all but about 12 MB of ram! Everything is stable, just slow to load the blockchain and by slow I mean about 10000 blocks per day! It spends more time in mmcqd (the flash memory driver) for disk reads/writes than it does in bitcoind. There is some room for improvement in bitcoind.

My thoughts are once it finally catches up with the blockchain it should be able to keep up fine with the network and should be able to run with P2Pool...

I'll keep you posted.

[jaebird]

Ok got new meritline 10 port hub. Still cannot get more than two icarus modules to work. I've found out that there may be a problem with the driver that broadcom is using for the usb subsystem. Details here:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=6929&p=99103
http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/linux-rpi-kernel/2012-June/000033.html

It seems like it is polling too fast and my dmesg reports things like:

Code:

INFO:: periodic_channel_available: Total channels: 8, Periodic: 5, Non-periodic: 3
INFO:: schedule_periodic: No host channel available for periodic transfer.
ERROR::dwc_otg_hcd_urb_enqueue:487: DWC OTG HCD URB Enqueue failed adding QTD. Error status -4008
pl2303 ttyUSB3: pl2303_open - failed submitting interrupt urb, error -4008
INFO:: periodic_channel_available: Total channels: 8, Periodic: 6, Non-periodic: 2
INFO:: schedule_periodic: No host channel available for periodic transfer.
ERROR::dwc_otg_hcd_urb_enqueue:487: DWC OTG HCD URB Enqueue failed adding QTD. Error status -4008
pl2303 ttyUSB2: pl2303_open - failed submitting interrupt urb, error -4008

So we may be SOL until the USB kernel folks reverse engineer or find a replacement USB driver.

FWIW the new hub identifies itself as:
TERMINUS TECHNOLOGY INC.

[CoinDiner]

Hi

Im not sure where your based but amazon.co.uk do these ones..
LogiLink USB 2.0 Hub 10-Port - Hub - 10 x Hi-Speed    and they are quiet cheap

would a RPi be capable of running a quad FPGA?

[jaebird]

Hi

Im not sure where your based but amazon.co.uk do these ones..
LogiLink USB 2.0 Hub 10-Port - Hub - 10 x Hi-Speed    and they are quiet cheap

would a RPi be capable of running a quad FPGA?

I fully believe the RasPi is capable of handling multitudes of icarus' or other USB connected FPGAs. However, there is a really bad USB kernel driver in the current OS images that seems to be jacking with interrupts. Until that is fixed, the most I get is 2 icarus.

[BR0KK]

got cgminer it running on my pi today

[iongchun]

Anyone tried mining Spartan6's on P2Pool using a RaspberryPi yet?

I run BTCMiner on RPi to drive my ZTEX FPGA board, it works fine.
I have to compile and use the following libraries, the source is in the SDK:
libusbJava64.so
libusbJavaSh.so
libusbJavaSt.so

Running p2pool makes me worried the I/O will destory my cheap SD card,
so I leave it and bitcoind on my Mac mini

[BR0KK]

Can u explain how u got Btcminer running on your pi ?

[iongchun]

Can u explain how u got Btcminer running on your pi ?

Sure..
1. apt-get install openjdk-6-jre and openjdk-6-jdk
2. Download the SDK here: http://www.ztex.de/downloads/#firmware_kit, extract it you will get "ztex" directory
3. cd to ztex/libusbJava-src, edit Makefile and change JAVAPREFIX to /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk (i.e JAVAPREFIX=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk)
4. type make, it should build libusbJava64.so, libusbJavaSh.so, and libusbJavaSt.so
5. Soft-link (ln -s) these 3 libraries to the directory where you will run BTCMiner in
6. Run BTCMiner regularly

But it is not stable, crashed my RPi twice in one day, I would go back to Mac before troubleshooting it

[BR0KK]

hmm cgminer isn't stable too ....

[punin]

If you want to run ztex on RPi, there's an ARM port available:

http://blog.villekangas.com

You will need to have java installed to run it:

sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jdk

Then just make sure you have ZtexBTCMiner-120417-ARM.jar in the directory where you run it:

java -cp ZtexBTCMiner-120417-ARM.jar BTCMiner etc..

You might want to tip the guy, and hopefully we'll have a RPi port of eldentyrrell's bitstream aswell.

I'm running a cluster with:

root@raspberrypi:~# uptime 14:46:34 up 2 days,  1:41,  1 user,  load average: 0.37, 0.41, 0.46

[BR0KK]

Nice ill try that, left him a tip of 0.5 BTC

It runs but not as good as i expected:

MH is to damn low .... May be my pool or network?  On My main Machine i get the full MH to the pool