A few questions and wishes though:
- With emdje's fw I was able to set the speed of each blade separately, this would be a nice option as my 88 wants to run one of six blades at a lower speed for best performance
- Are you considering to put the 2 cdmrrd directories on a tmpfs to have less write on the SD card (I like the graphs, but I fear they could wear out the SD card quite quickly)?
- How about taking the primary configured pool as ping target ?
- A secondary pool config to switch to would be nice but it's not that big deal
I can add to the TODO list to allow individual blade setting as well - I'll probably make it an option, so you can set them all the same, or choose them individually if you're so inclined. Just for my own reference, how were you determining you should run a blade at a lower clock rate? What happened at higher ones?
Thank you for your feedback. The mentioned 88 has one blade that gives upto 3-5% errors when run at 1200MHz, when I change this one blade to 1000MHz, I
feel like I get overall better results from this specific miner. Otherwise its a nice feature to check how a specific blade behaves at a specific speed but admittedly except the above 88 all my other miners run at the same speed on all their blades.
A good suggestion on cgmrrd, what I'll do on the next one is make that tmpfs, and then make sure that as part of the bootup process it regenerates things, so there aren't a bunch of broken links. I don't mind the broken links as much on the first install, but would like it cleaner once up.
Great, having a stable and solid fs is important to me as my miners are getting switched on/off automatically. So there are days with 2-3 on/off transitions and having a lot of possible writes to the SD card ongoing makes me fear I am going to replace the first SD cards soon.
I would propose to have a picture with the images shipped which is just blank and has a text saying, "please wait a few minutes for statistics to be generated". This could be in place when the firmware first starts so you do not have broken links (i.e. if the graphs do not exist, copy the empty image there at boot).
For running I would propose to save the rrd databases regulary on the SD card somewhere, say every 1h. That is not perfect as it still gets the SD card some writes, but it reduces them a lot. If you i.e. tar.gz all rrd databases that should take minimal space and reduce writes even more. On boot, just check if the backup is existing and populate the tmpfs with the backup files.
I would even rotate those snapshots (having 2 of them, latest and latest+1) so that in case the switchoff happens when the tar.gz is built you have a working archive, so if unpacking the latest returns an error from tar, go for the latest+1.
On the pool as the ping target, the reason I didn't do that was a couple of the pools I tested were blocking ICMP, so no ping responses - so I figured Google was the next best thing, since they work hard to be as fast as possible, and would probably represent your base case Internet latency. It might be worth it to have a 3rd one which is primary or maybe even all pools (different line for different ones) - that way you could see at what level an outage occurs, etc.
What do you mean "secondary pool config switch"? Do you mean two different sets of 3 pool?
Exactly, and a selection to work on group 1 or 2. I was quite happy with that feature to quickly change where and what I mine without loosing all the primary pools and worker-logins (it's not much of a deal but I found it very comfortable).
Also I noticed the image is 8GB in size, but the partitions inside account only for about 2.8GB. May I propose to either grow the fs to use the remaining space and/or create an image that also fits on 2GB/4GB cards. (Actually I use it with all 3 sizes of cards)
I would be happy to help with all of the above ideas/wishes, just let me know what I can contribute.
Ah, that's legacy from the original InnoSilicon image I used - but I will look to resize it to 4GB, that way it will work fine for everyone, and be faster to flash.
Nice, I'd be happy to offer a howto on growing or shrinking the images (i.e. growing the 4GB image to an 8GB card or to shrink the 4GB for a 2GB card).