In my previous post outlining tips about smart contract deployment using parity and truffle, I mentioned I’ll be passing along a bit of mining news in this post. AMD has finally released their block chain specific drivers for Linux, on order to overcome growing memory sizes for memory hard mining algorithms. This will be an extremely short post explaining how to do the upgrade, since it’s almost trivial.

The install

First install the new software:

wget -qO - http://repo.radeon.com/rocm/apt/debian/rocm.gpg.key | sudo apt-key add - sudo sh -c 'echo deb [arch=amd64] http://repo.radeon.com/rocm/apt/debian/ xenial main > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/rocm.list' sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install rocm

Next add GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="amdgpu.vm_fragment_size=9" to the grub file:

sudo vim /etc/default/grub GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="amdgpu.vm_fragment_size=9" sudo update-grub

and reboot.

Hash Rate

We experienced a ~2 Mh/s increase on each GPU after installing this new driver, which seems to be what everyone else is getting as well. As of now there doesn’t appear to be any drawbacks associated with this new driver, so give it a shot!

Notes

A couple things to note. When I did this install, I thought it was replacing the amdgpu-pro drivers we installed in this tutorial. So I un-installed them before the reboot. This is not correct. The rocm package is a kernel level component for the entire amdgpu-pro driver package, not a replacement.

That’s all for now! as I said, this one would be short. Next time I plan on discussing some tweaks we’ve made to our operating system, and why we made them. Until then!