Hi folks,

this is the announcement thread for lolMiner-144.5 v0.38 public preview.

So what is this miner good for: at the moment it mines Equihash 144.5 (BTG, BTCZ, LitecoinZ, Safecoin, Snowgem) OpenCL based, so for Nvidia and AMD.

Why it is a preview? Well the miner is kind of a successor to my Minexcoin (MNX) miner you can find here. The final version is supposed to be wider configureable as it is now, bring an API and add the Minexcoin miner (and others) as well.

If you do not want to read much more long descriptions, here are the download links:

[Lin 64] Klick me (0.38 Preview for Linux)

[Win 64] Klick me (0.38 Preview for Windows)

Compatibility:

Nvidia:

For Nvidia the miner runs on any Maxwell and newer generation GPU with at least 3G of RAM and CUDA 8 or newer installed. That said there is a restriction: due to some driver specific hard codings it does not work in Windows with 3/4G Nvidia cards while on Linux that is no problem when the cards are in compute mode. I will work on resolving the Windows issue soon.

AMD:

For AMD we require any 4G / 8G GCN2 and newer GPU, so Hawaii (R9 290 / 390), Tonga (R9 285 / 380), Fiji (R9 Fury series), Baffin (RX 460 / 560), Ellesmere (470, 480, 570 and 580) and Vega series GPU. Most kernels (exceptions below) are build with the 17.40 blockchain driver.

For Vega: The Windows kernel for Vega is build with a very new AMD driver version (Adrenalin version 18.5.1). It is unknown if older drivers then this are supported. For Linux the AMD Vega kernel is only available for the AMD ROCM-CL driver! I have to admit that we did not test Vega GPUs yet, so crossing fingers it will work. Else I will try get it working asap.

Setup:

There is a quickstart guide shipped with the miner. Read that carefully and it should work. Else feel free to ask here Wink

Estimated speed:

The miner just got finished, so we have no broad basis yet.

But approximately:

GTX 1080: ~36 sol/s

RX 560: ~7 sol/s

RX 580: ~13 sol/s

R9 290: ~12 sol/s

All depend on OC settings of cause Smiley

F.A.Q. and known Issues:

The AMD miner is slow…

Well, I know that. I was struggling get this working, so tuning is now next, see schedule below.

Miner hangs on 0 sol/s (AMD)…

When the GPU does not complete its work and hangs a GPU the miner will try to close itself as soon as possible for restart. On Nvidia this works very well, but on AMD the driver timeout is 1 hour, so this takes a pretty long time. Lowering OC settings usually makes this evens much more rare.

The Windows miner crashes…

… from time to time. This is because the Windows version is a cross build with pretty old runtimes. This will be resolved soon (hopefully). In the meantime head out for a Windows watchdog I will provide next days that mitigates the problem.

My coin with Equihash 144.5 is missing…

Oh, sry, maybe I just was not aware of this. Drop me a note here with the required details and I will add is very quickly. This is a rather quick action Smiley

How much is the fee?

I used to start with an 2% fee like for my MNX miner. That said I lower the fee once payed of my expenses and time to develop stuff. For example for Minexcoin I lowered the fee to 1.5% after a month and next release will be even lowered to 1%. Expect similar here.

Does the miner disconnect for fee?

No, I has two connections open all of the time and does every x iterations one iteration for me. That way the mining income remains smooth. Also the displayed sol/s are net with fee already calculated out, so what you see is what you get.

What comes next?

I will try to build a bit more efficient AMD kernels within the next week. Then from the things recently learned I will do a mayor code change for AMD to improve performance further. Furthermore I think in about 2 weeks I will add Zero (Equihash 192.7) to the miner.

Finally in about a month there should be 0.4 with the promised MNX integration and a simple API crossing fingers.

Why JSON for configuration? Why? Whyyyyy?

Huuusshhh. Just be careful with setting ‘,’ and all will be good. When used to it, it is a very need way to configure the miner, you will see.

That version number is strange…

Well the next release version for my MinexCoin miner is supposed to be 0.4 and the development versions go along with internal feature level… so this is mainly for myself to keep track Wink