Topic: CUDA mining on debian jessie (Read 143 times)

Hello all,

I am waiting until after christmas to try to pick up some terahash-level bitcoin miners for a more reasonable price, but in the meantime I am going to try my hand at GPU mining eth, Zcash, and some other cryptocurrencies that nvidia CUDA is supposed to be best at.

I have a lenovo p50 with windows 7 on SSD and debian on HDD, with an integrated Intel skylake gpu as well as a discreet nvidia quadro m2000m. I also have a Xeon E3 CPU, and error-correcting RAM, 16 GB I believe. In order to set up CUDA mining on a dual-gpu system, from what I have read at least, one needs to use the nvidia proprietary driver which blacklisting the debian driver (nouveau) and building CUDA for the generic linux from the Ubuntu packages. However, after two attempts following the directions linked below, I have had no luck.

try 1:
https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@joshmocek/how-to-mine-zcash-with-nvidia-gpus
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/218163/how-to-install-cuda-toolkit-7-8-9-on-debian-8-jessie-or-9-stretch

try 2:

https://www.imabit.com/2016/10/installing-nvidia-drivers-and-cuda-7-5-in-debian-jessie/


Basically, the nvidia driver won't install because I can't figure out how to completely uninstall the debian drivers, even with running

sudo apt-get autoremove
sudo apt-get remove --purge xserver-xorg-video-nouveau
sudo apt-get purge nvidia*

and other such things. The logfile at /var/log/nvidia.../nvidia-installer.log corroborates that the nvidia driver aborts installation because the installer cleanup fails to remove the old installation of drivers done from the debian repositories. It recommends I stick with debian and use a driver from jessie backports.

This all took a lot of time considering it is just a proof of concept for GPU mining and a basic investigation into what sort of hashrate I can receive, to inform plns of possibly building a gpu mining rig. I hoped messing with nvidia cards and CUDA would give me some idea of whether i should stick with nvidia or go with radeon for a mining rig. My question to you is whether or not there is any significant advantage to cuda mining that would make it worth the time to continue putting together an operating system based around it for mining. If there is no real advantage to CUDA, I would start looking into other approaches for a GPU mining rig. Any advice on whether or not to continue with this project, or how to continue setting up CUDA mining on debian 8, would be much appreciated. Just for your information, I have a decent amount of funding set aside for possibly constructing a 6-card gpu mining rig to accompany a litecoin (scrypt) miner and a bitcoin miner that would, in sum, be the entire set up I intend to employ in order to minimize my mining risk by investing in mining hardware for a wider array of coins. Depending on what I find gives the best advantage, I intend to purchase the most efficient and economical GPUs. I won't be attempting to patch together old or overly outdated equipment, as I want it to be competitive. I just don't have enough exposure to mining to know exactly what such a setup would be and am experimenting with equipment I already have to try to get a good idea. If you already know, then less experimenting for me! Thanks.