Topic: Awesome Miners Antminer S9 firmware (Read 1032 times)

This sounds like a more fair compromise, i was thinking the exact same thing...

---

Perhaps you are already aware of the Slushpool next endeavor: Replacing cgminer with their own fork (also open source) made in the rust language. They are calling it bOSminer i think, and is about to be presented publicly. It was needed among other reasons due to the need to integrate newer hardware, and the lack of interest to update or maintain cgminer from their own developers.

With this it is expected they will add support for more asic miners beyond the S9 and T1. For newer miners i think it will be a matter of time before they get dissected and better understood. I wouldn't expect api compatibility, they will probably change things, but its fully open so you can adjust your monitor for it (again). Yeah i know, but remember it was Bitmain that changed cgminer, not the other way around lol.

Thanks for your feedback and comments - they are always welcome!

Of the 2% mining fee we are actually getting half of it. So we do benefit from customers that go for the Awesome Miner firmware. This is also the reason why we can provide product support for it and also integrate it well with Awesome Miner. Users of other Vnish firmware do get most of the features as well, so your point is valid that we do give away features to a larger user base. Some features like setting Mining Profiles via Awesome Miner is exclusive to our brand of the firmware. We could make more feature exclusive, but we are also trying to be nice to our customers and respect what decisions they make.

It's however not possible for us to control this pricing model of the firmware by much, as it needs to align with what the Vnish firmware uses for other firmware brands. We don't have the option to make the mining fee 0% or 1% as it cannot compete with other Vnish brands by providing a lower fee. This is why I stated above that although I appreciate any feedback and comments related to the pricing, it cannot change and it will stay on 2%. The only direction we are allowed to change the mining fee is to make it higher (2.5% or 3%), but I know this isn't what you where looking for.

As we cannot make the mining fee lower, the only option left that I can see would be to make Awesome Miner not consuming any licenses as long as you are running Antminers with our firmware. We would have to investigate this more, but it might be either license + 2% mining fee or no license requirements + 2.5% mining fee for example. Everyone may not like the concept, but it's an option - just like using this firmware is an option.

Please note that my comments in the section above is just about exploring possibilities based on the topic we discuss - it's not something we have in the pipeline or decided to go for. Please consider this point when reading the statements above. Thanks!

---

Hi Enrico,

Thanks for the additional feedback. It's appreciated.

You are correct that there are some older source code available for S9, but it's not up-to-date and lacks features. And going forward, it's way more complicated on S15 and S17 where there is nothing to start from. As we need to maintain focus on delivering good solutions for monitoring and management of mining operations, we see firmware as something where we need partnerships and integrations rather than investing in the development ourselves. It would of course be nice if we could do all this on our own, but it's unfortunately not realistic for us based on our observations.

It's very nice of the Braiins team to release BraiinsOS free of charge, open source and with full flexibility. I fully agree with your point here. But as we don't have the other income sources as I assume they have with Slushpool, we don't have the luxury of giving away the solutions we develop. We always try to be as nice and flexible as possible to make our customers happy, but at the end of the day we also need to run a sustainable business in order to support our customers long term.

I appreciate your comments about the pricing. A general note is that Awesome Miner is actually less expensive than some of the other popular premium solutions for monitoring. The goal is always to make our users happy by making it possible for them to run their mining operations as smooth as possible, making our software solution valuable for them.

Many thanks for your opinions and comments!

Thanks for the very accurate answer; honestly I’m surprised that your developer staff doesn’t have the skills and resources to develop a custom firmare based on original BM source side!

I could do it even by myself with my limited programming experience if only I wish to invest some time on a project like that; however it would be a nonsense for the limited miners I have to manage and most of all, the  wide availability of free open source solution currently available for free.

I think that Awesome Miner (that is definitely not a cheap product...) should have had to offer his his solution to their customers for free as did by SlushPool with Brains OS, that is neither restricted to run in their pool!

A matter of style before any other economic or technical onside consideration, but again, it’s just my humble opinion.

All the best
/ Enrico

I fully understand the concept for AW firmware for S9, on the other hand you are basically giving your user base to VNISH without any benefit to you or your customers (if i got it right you don't participate in 2% fee). There is a lot of additional features you can add to this firmware which would make a great tool for larger farms. I bet if you would lower fee to say 1% and make FW work only with AM (something like ASICseer has) this would produce more gains to you and VNISH as well.
  In order to incentives you customers to switch to "your" firmware there needs to be some kind of exclusivity and gain...

Hi,

Thanks for your detailed reply and your honest feedback - it's appreciated.

It may not have been a fully fair evaluation of the firmware performance if there at the same time were attempts made to bypass the DevFee pool mining. It becomes difficult to tell if it's an evaluation of the firmware performance or an evaluation of the firmware tamper protection.

Anyway, I do see the main point you bring up here, related to the mining fee. I will try to give some background information here to at least explain it - also because there were a number of posts about the mining fee earlier in this thread.

First of all, we have not developed this firmware from scratch on our own. We don't have the resources to do that. The firmware is the result of a partnership where we have been working close with a firmware developer to provide better integration between the Antminer firmware and the Awesome Miner application. For this reason, I don't have control over the mining fee level. If we would have the resources to develop our own firmware, it would of course be a completely different case regarding the mining fee.

It all started with a number of existing users contacted us and pointed out that they successfully been testing different custom firmware (all with ~2% mining fee) and wanted to deploy this on a larger scale with better Awesome Miner integration. When running mining operations at this scale, getting performance improvements of >10% results in quite a large amount of extra income - making it easy for them to accept a mining fee. Other users were already running some custom firmware solutions with a 2% mining fee, but also wanted a better integration with Awesome Miner.

By making this firmware partnership that resulted in the Awesome Miner Antminer firmware in combination with better Awesome Miner integration - we could offer a solution to these users that made them super happy. As some already had firmware solutions with a 2% mining fee, the Awesome Miner firmware delivered better integration for the same mining fee.

I do understand that the concept of a mining fee can upset some users. However, the alternatives we had was never about having a mining fee or not having a mining fee - it was about if we would provide this firmware as an option to the users that would find it valuable - or not provide any firmware solution at all.

So the bottom line is that the firmware, with the mining fee, is offered as an option for those that finds it a valuable. Some of our customers are very happy with this solution but I also have full understanding that the firmware may not be for everyone. If someone is looking for an open source solution without a mining fee, BraiinsOS is a great option. I've had a number of discussions with the BraiinsOS developers to make sure Awesome Miner runs fine with their firmware. From an Awesome Miner perspective, you should of course be able to run the firmware solution you want - but I don't see anything wrong in giving our users one more option to choose between. If our reputation is questioned because of this, I might have failed in explaining the idea behind the firmware as it wasn't released with the intent to make anyone upset - just in response to what some of our users were asking for.

Thanks!

Hi Patrike

the auto tune feature was disabled, that chart is the snapshot of miners behaviour running all night long.

The miners was manually set to low power on the whole single chains, (475 MHz, 8,1÷8,5V ~ 780W / 10 THs) replicating exactly the settings previously running on Braiins OS to make the comparison reliable.

Workers was set to SlushPool EU servers, while DevFee was set to Singapore; honestly this shouldn't be the cause of the drops shown on the chart.

Anyway, at this point it doesn't really matters, if really I'm the only one having experienced these strange behaviours perhaps it has been my fault as before I've tried to hack the DevFee workers tweaking the router attempting (unsuccessfully) to get rid of them; perhaps the firmware is so maliciously intelligent to remember hacks attempts and vendicate itself :-)

Regardless benchmark oddities, the most disappointing aspect, is that it's a shame for Awesome Miner to promote DevFee firmware to their paying customers!

And most generally speaking, why pay fees for a suspicious firmare that basically doesn't performs better than others whose source code is open source such as BOS??

Honestly Awe Miner reputation doesn't come out strengthened by this questionable marketing operation. IMHO of course... does someone disagree on this point?

Hello,

Thanks for trying out the firmware and for your feedback.

About the number of Accepted share - the difficulty level on the two DevFee pools are very low compared to your main pool. For this reason the DevFee pools will produce many more accepted shares, although they are running on a hashrate no more than 2% of the total available hashrate. For this reason it's not possible to look only on the Accepted value to understand how the hashrate is distributed.

For the hashrate drop at the pool I would need more information in order to investigate. Did you experience this pool hashrate drop shortly after applying the firmware or did it happen all of a sudden? Was it before or after you tried to delay the network trafic to the DevFee pool - which of course would result in connection issues and the reboots?

Typically when you apply this firmware and select a Mining Profile is that the firmware will do auto tuning of the ASIC chips. Depending on if they are in good shape or not, and what Mining Profile you selected, this process can take some time. Everything from 10 minutes to many hours.

We have a number of customers running this firmware on quite large scale mining operations with very good results. It also looks like several users in this thread have successfully deployed the firmware.

Just reach out to me if you want me to investigate your scenario further to find out why it didn't perform as expected. Also let me know if you have any questions. Thanks!

I see, but how could explain the mining pool showing halved scoring hash rate and this workers chart?

https://ibb.co/MfFm4Q6

I think he missed in initial post this line


Like i said testing showed that everything is in line.

Hey esol. Similar to the other board member here, I am not seeing the same issues on my test miner as you are. The disconnects on the pool db you showed are very strange.  Not sure what else to say!

Would be curious to see your settings you used...

I have been an awesome miner user for many years now and have no reason to think anything shady is going on here.

I have 50 workers on this fw for testing, everything is in line, payouts, pool graph on btc.com ...

Not saying that this fw is a miracle  but 20-25% dev fee would raise alarm long time ago in original AM thread.
Also i'm pretty sure that AM, HiveOS (same VNISH FW) wouldn't support something that could hurt there clients in anyway...

Also accepted column in status page is not what you think it is...

dude, the evidence as said is that the sum of "accepted" blocks of the two DevFee workers reported in miner status page, was in some case nearly half of my main worker URL! Some other miners reported "just" 20-25% of DevFee blocks...

Also the TX/RX packets counter related to destination IPs of my legit and dev workers (all targeting SlushPool) shown in MikroTik router, was matching the same percentage shown in miner stat page.

Then, the active workers graph on SlushPool dashboard shown a zig-zag shape that means my legit worker went down for prolonged periods before resume...

I also did a test to "tarpit" forward traffic to Dev workers destination addresses (with /ip/filter rules) just to delay traffic reducing efficiency (and thus priority) without killing the sockets, and it partially worked! I mean the number of "accepted" blocks has reduced drastically, but after some minutes the two DevFee workers turn to "death" and the miner automatically reboots in an endless loop..

I'm sorry I didn't take screenshots to prove what I'm reporting, but I've run the test for the whole last night and today my priority was to resume ASAP the Braiins OS firmare! You may easily replicate this condition by yourself, but I suggest to run at least 3-4 miners at once for a couple of hours.

Here the screenshot of last night SlushPool dash showing workers drops: https://ibb.co/MfFm4Q6

I want to heavily complain with Awe Miner support as they are legitimating a scam tool spoiling their trust and reputation!

This firmware itself is not so bad (nothing revolutionary ever seen so far though), but in my opinion AM should distribute an "hack-free" verified version to their licensed users...

Hi esol. To be honest, not sure where/how you are getting this info. Please provide more details when you are insinuating things like this! I'm not saying this is the best FW by any means, but I have not seen the same results you all out above.

I have installed this FW on only a single miner and have been watching the stats pretty closely. And seems to be working as advertised. I open to be convinced otherwise though

well, I've istalled the AweMiner firmware n 7 S9, it is based to one of the many DevFee hacks already seen; it is clearly developed in Russia, and the big surprise is that DevFee id MUCH MORE than 2%, it can reach up to 40-50% as shown by "accepted" counter in miner stats page and by global severe decline of total hash rate reported by the mining pool.

Some workers often hang as shown by SushPool chart, Fee workers are set to mine on SlushPool too. a total SCAM legitimated by Awesome Miner that make me suspect also of their monitor App.

Shame AM, tay away!

Well nothing much to say, decent firmware doing what is supposed to do (must admit like it more the BraiinOS) you could keep it open in case something new pops up. For now people might share there settings since orginal AM thread is filed with GPU talk.


set chains to 640~650 and voltage per chain 8.4, do the chip auto tune in steps of 2 and 2 min also mark "Reset chip freq and clear log (set all chip to global freq)". also set "HR from ideal" to 80%.

Depending on the quality and condition of your ASICS this can take from 30 min to 6 hours.

After you done on mining status window you can check which chain is the closest to ideal, in most cases that chain can be further undervolted to 8.3 (even 8.2) with out crossing the 80% mark from ideal hashrate.

Some miners can handle this some don't, found this to be the optimal setting. Some claim that on higher freq you can achieve even better Th/W ratio but its summer (and a very hot one in EU) so didn't try it yet.

What settings did you use to achieve this result?  Been playing around with diff auto-tune settings, but haven't been able to get my W/Th that low.  Thanks!!

Thank you for the 1st useful info about it.
I had a feeling that it might be an existing firmware that has been re-skinned. I'll keep this thread open for the rest of the week but if there is no further input, after the week is over I'll be locking the thread.

AM firmware is just VNISH firmware with custom skin and decent integration with AM. IF you have a large farm it can come handy to control everything from AM.

I do agree that if you use AM the firmware should be at least with a very low dev fee.

As for the firmware, if you manually tweak S9 best i could achieve was 13.8 ths/1150W which is not bad regarding th/w.

I entirely agree. Personally I detest the idea of DevFee firmware. Just find it odd that there has been no mention of it here.

I do know that the AM home thread was moved by mods to the altcoin software area because much of its development and Forum discussions the past couple years has been aimed at said crap coins. However, as this deals exclusively with their S9 firmware I think this thread should be safe...

As for the cost of AM, I find it was a very reasonable expense. Yes cost scales with how many miners you monitor/control but that 1-time cost has lifetime upgrades and support and is applied in full to the cost of scaling to the next levels of how many you can control. I love it for my modest farm of 18 26 miners (mostly Avalons & forgot multiple miners per host).

Again, with per-chip tuning this at least looks interesting for folks that run S9's.

Its strange that Awesome Miner did not announce here their custom firmware, given that they have announced Awesome Miner itself...

I don't think people should use any S9 firmware with dev fee, no single feature is worth any fees they ask, given most (if not all) features are provided for free either by manufacturer or the Free and Open Source BraiinsOS.

Also, Awesome Miner itself isn't free, and its actually quite expensive by itself. Now with this firmware you are supposed to give them even more money?

I saw mention of it in version notes for the past couple AM upgrades and so far have seen no mention of it here.
Anyone try it yet? ref https://www.awesomeminer.com/antminerfirmware Not sure if it requires also running AM to access it.

I only have 2 s9's left running so can't say I can give it a good test but seems the same as other 2% dev fee custom firmware here where one pays for the privilege of being able to tweak the heck out of a S9.

About the fee: This the first custom FW that clearly spells out how the 2% dev fee works.
From their above web page:

Again, curious if anyone has had a chance to kick the tires on this FW. Does it use the known security risk xnonce for the parallel mining?

edit: added emphasis to the dev pool hashrate