Topic: [EASYMINER] GPU mining OS (Read 2467 times)

Yep.  That's pretty awesome actually.  Guess it's linux-based.  Hard to tell.  Hard to blame him for soft-peddling that, I guess.  

Wonder how much graphics simplemining is pushing through the pipes.  Wonder if it needs X to be running on the host machine.  Just thinking with the MBA side of my brain, I don't think that's the optimal way to do it. I don't think that's the direction it's going.  I see the AMD world tossing X to the curb. No idea what nvidia is up to, but I think OpenCl is the eye of the storm, and from what I've read, that is and has been moving in the direction of bypassing X altogether.  Not quite there yet, I don't think.  But I think that's where it's going.

I'm assuming there's always been client-side software in the mix.  Question I have is, can ALL the graphical stuff be client-side.  I mean, it's not 1984 anymore, right?  

Got a nickel says your average miner would do anything to ditch the graphical environment.  Suspect most do, if they can.  Suspect those who do bring a lot of expertise to the table, or else pay for it.

So yeah, could be an opportunity there.  Host-side product that is delivered (and maintained) with drivers, software, scripts, networking and security baked into the pie.  Client side software ported to...  well that's the thing.  Kinda feel OP is looking at it upside down.  Big task trying to figure out how to build from scratch.  Build the app first, and I think everything else will start to look quite clear.  Put it this way.  When he starts looking to see what's lurking beneath the surface of android, chrome OS, chrome browser, steam --  I think he's going to be pleasantly surprised.

Now, the question is, where does he add value.

I'll start with the proposition that miners aren't precisely "making money," and speculators aren't precisely "investing."  We are engaged in the process of providing liquidity for people who are willing to pay for it.  That's what gold miners do, and that's what we are doing too, only better.  No gold miner ever offered to guard your gold against theft, keep your books for you, and open up a "Paypal Gold" account for you.  OP is right about that, and right about how important decentralization is to the whole scheme.  

And he's right about the need to get power to the people, because up until now, liquidity was a government problem.  Your average guy seldom runs into a liquidity issue.  I mean, if you really have to sell your car right now today to afford tuition, yes you have a liquidity problem.  If you don't have enough assets to pay your tuition, that's different.  

Things are different now.  Every man, woman and child in India has a liquidity problem right now today.  Every Chinese dude who wants to invest in American or European securities has a liquidity problem.  Every guy in Venezuela or Zimbabwe who is tired of working for "money" because he can't convince the guy at walmart to trade toilet paper for it has a liquidity problem.  

This is the interesting and subtle part about OP's proposal.  It's that jillions of ordinary folks around the world are gonna be willing to pay for liquidity (and anonymity, and hedge value), and that it would be kinda good for ordinary folks to facilitate that.  I mean, we don't want to double the hashrate overnight.  But we don't want the network to be dominated by a few government-approved whales, either.  

Where he's not quite on it is the ease-of-use thing.  Screw that.  That misses the point entirely.  It's not that, I dunno, Africans are too stupid to figure out network security.  It's that everybody's time is worth something, and if people are going to run a node -- which is what it's really all about -- it needs to be worth their time.  The only entity that can consistently afford to waste money is the government, and that's how the whales get in.  

It's about making it work.   It's about making running a node businesslike and efficient.  And I think the key to the whole thing is getting rid of unnecessary complexity.  Which means, getting rid of unnecessary overhead and uncertainty.  

Look.  I like my Mac as much as the next guy, but once I got the idea in my head to build 10 or 20 mining rigs, it occurred to me that the GUI is a Faustian bargain.  I'd rather eat worms than manage a 20-node Windows network, and Ubuntu isn't much better.  Either way, I'm always one upgrade away from down time.  In both cases, I think the graphical environment is the problem.  Of course it is.  I look at my work computer.  It's not just that they make us use Windows, not just that, as a result, they have insane hardware and IT costs.  It's that they make us use Citrix.  Which means, we are running Windows inside Windows.  Even when it works, we are trying to cram all those graphics through these little tiny pipes, which wouldn't seem so tiny except to the extent that we make them so.  I can't believe they can afford to pay me what they do to sit there and watch the spinning hourglass of death every time I click the mouse, not to mention having to boot Windows multiple times every day, because it never works for long.  Not to mention having to boot it TWICE multiple times every day.  Who thought that was a good idea?  Have we lost our minds?  And running xorg-xserver-GDM-metacity-unity on 20 machines that never interact with a human is even worse.  I mean, windows can't help what it is.  Linux should know better.  

Meanwhile I've been trying for the last month to prototype a rig, and every time I turn around I'm changing my protocol because some new version of radeon-turbo-nitro-OC-pro won't talk to this week's version of X-almighty-whatever, not to mention the fact that my motherboard is constantly accusing me of feeding it the Stuxnet virus.  And just to be clear, the kernel is sitting over there saying "I didn't do it," and I believe it.   It's the graphical environment every doggone time.  If I could figure out how to compile the software without it, I would.  Fortunately, it doesn't need anything with an X in it to run, so I kick that sucker, and the trash it hangs out with,  to the curb as fast as I can.  My feeling is that the people writing the code feel much the same way.  

Now, I'll startxfce4 (or nowadays I guess I have to ask systemctl to handle it, don't even get me started) if it's the most efficient way to do what I want to do, and sometimes it is.  It is not the most efficient way to keep my machines running and talking to each other.  It's the opposite of that.  

That's the point.  Ease of use ain't the thing.  I'm not stupid,  I'm busy.  So if you're talking about my money?  Deliver me a host product that works, and keeps working.  And a client that lays out what I need to know without having to ask for it, basically.  You're doggone right I'd pay for that.  You don't need to make it easy, not exactly.  I mean, we don't engineer the cockpit display in an F22 precisely to make it easy.  We lay it out in such a way that the human brain has direct access to critical information without going through a translation paradigm. We are removing clutter, removing intermediate steps, taking some of the workload off the brain.  Removing unnecessary complexity and overhead.   I know that's what you really meant, or at least on one level I think that's what you meant.  Stay focused on that.  

Key to the whole thing, OP, is to solve the right problem.  The GUI is the problem, not the solution.  We baked the icing into the cake, which was a mistake.  If you can dig us out of that mess, you win.  

While there's already NiceHash (and some other I can't remember) that pretty much does this, I came across a program called "SuchFlex" maybe half a year ago. They were pretty much this. While only working on Windows, it had a somewhat nice looking GUI. All you had to do was to install it and run it. It did everything else. You could pick how you wanted to get paid, they had bitcoin wallets, Steam gift cards and even PayPal (and other stuff). It was, however, very basic in the options-department (as it was basically just "install-and-run") and they had a 20% commission so they weren't really for any of us.

But, like you say, perhaps some of those college kids with free electricity and brand-new turbo-nitro-double-oc II GPU's.

They shut down though (but they did pay out any amount left on people's accounts so they didn't run away with any money, just wanted to be clear about that).

Focus.  What are we talking about here?

- Cloud mining?
- Application development?
- Maintaining a distro?
- Developing an app?

In order:

1.  Been done.
2. Requires great depth of expertise.  I see consolidation in the development sector, and suspect this is why.  Not many people have what it takes to compete with Wolf0 in that regard, I suspect.
3. That's the problem.  Not so much with Windows.  In which case I would say we are already there; I mean, how hard is it to download a binary and double-click it.  In the linux world, we are dealing with a fluid and unpredictable situation. Nobody is really sure what combination of kernel, window manager, display manager and desktop will work with which graphics card, with this week's version of amdgpu-pro, let alone what will work next month with whatever version of X gets dropped on us (or enlightenment), or how AMD plans to deal with it.  Could be some interest in developing something like "Steam OS for miners." If you can deal with all that.  
4.  Now we're talking.  

I do think there's a demand for a graphical front-end to the mining software that's currently being developed. A scalable solution would be pretty awesome.  

Beyond that, I think the whole thing is moving away from X and company.  I think we are looking at a future where mining software works directly with hardware, through OpenCl I guess, in the multi-user environment.  Arguably we are almost there.  Right about now, if you look at Wolf's software, you only really need the graphical environment for ease of installation.  Once you get it installed, you can drop down to multi-user and it still works.  That was true for fglrx too.  If I'm right about that, they've been moving in that direction for a while.  

And you're right.  People gripe about how hard it is to make stuff work with whatever graphical environment they happen to like, but aren't wiling to wrangle the command line, which to many of us seems like the duh-obvious answer.

So if you're thinking about pulling back from the text console, hooking into the API and coming up with a better user interface, I think there's some demand for it, and you don't have to beat the developers at their own game.  In fact, I suspect they would be delighted to see you succeed.  

If you're just trying to get your foot in the door, make an app.  Me, I'd make one for Steam OS, gotta figure there's a lot of college kids out there with free electricity and a brand-new turbo-nitro-double-oc II graphics card that's looking for work. Gotta figure AMD isn't going to kick Steam to the curb, or vice versa.   Or an android app, I dunno.  I don't think I'd try to make a whole OS ala Steam, but if that's your dream, go for it.  Especially if you have experience with network administration, network security and development.  

If that's even what you're thinking.  

Look. When I was in business school, the goal was to get your business plan down to an "elevator pitch."  You're in Vegas staying at the Trump, and lo and behold the Don sashays onto your elevator.  You got however long it takes to get to whatever floor you're on to make your pitch. and one chance to knock it out of the park.   That's what you need to be shooting for.  You aren't there yet. Which is kind of not good.  People in the business come to this forum; you get maybe one paragraph before they blow you off.  If you have any of the expertise I mentioned, don't think out loud.  Come up with a plan and pitch it. 

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/mining-os-simpleminingnet-manage-your-gpu-farm-the-easy-way-30-days-free-1541084


Maybe you should look at this.

It will be not only one OS, instead it will be three tools: Boss, Manager and Worker.

Boss - tool to watch all rigs in a farm and give them "orders" like reboot or install a new Worker or drivers or change pool and whatever.. Also it will keep images of Worker OSes and all settings for every rig. This tool can be on the rig or on a separate computer.
Manager - "middle-OS" that will run when rig boots, bring the new Worker OS to rig (if Boss says so), change video card ROMs, setup miner, restart and boot to Worker.
Worker - actual mining OS with drivers and software. Includes restart watchdog.

Three setups are possible: One rig, Many rigs (one of them contains Boss) and Farm (Boss on a separated computer).

This schema lets owner to have full control of everything in one place.

Nice to meet you guys!

This thread is for miners. Its mean we are not too lazy.
Simplemining is great and I used it before but it made by only one developer and he cannot do the BIOS things for all the cards exist. Update all the miners and drivers is not that easy too.
The goal of this not existing yet OS is to provide the "hardcore" profit to general public.

Please read the previews answer.

I'm glad to find someone who understand the idea and I hope you will help me to spread the word.

I guess that you are interested in more profitable mining too. Also maybe I will need your help in establish an escrow for donation-bounty system for development. Please read the initial post.

I am running 7 four card rigs and 1 eight card rig with simple mining.

Thank you very much to the OP for giving this thread as i was also searching for this type of OS , and the site simplemining.net is very good through it i am able to setup my own mining unit. Hope others will also take benefit from this thread.

I think that what you are looking for is simplemining.net

If you have no hardware and are too Lazy to assemble any, go to Genesis mining and proceed to burn away your cash.
If you have hardware, or are willing to spend the time needed to building it, go to Simplemining.net and get their great OS.
If you are hardcore, build the rig, setup the miners, mod BIOS, tweak settings and setup automated scripts for everything.

Hello!
I'm a newbie miner and I'm from Russia. I've been watching bitcoin and coins for 7 years but only now I made decision to participate and it's not easy. Actually in this 7 years it becomes more and more complicated to dive in.

GPU mining community needs an easy way to setup most efficient mining for rigs. Tons of messages like "Help me to setup my rig!!1" appears here and there. Setup and maintain a most profitable mining rig is way too hard because it is really complicated. Miner need to read tons of forums just to choose the software then he need to always watch for updates for mining software and pools. Also there is bios and drivers improvements and updates.

I think all this can be done by developing all in one mining OS and providing a Plug'n'Play solution for users who are willing to give their hashing power for the network and community but who have no time to understand all these tech things. They should just choose what coin to mine and mining mode (like aggressive or power-saving) and that's all. Everything else should be done by professionals and enthusiasts who will participate in the OS development.
Development should be done by professionals by using bounty system. This bounty should be provided by the community through donation.

Developers can ask for bounty for coin/GPU improvements and if community will provide sufficient amount then dev will be hired. The OS will be auto updated with the improvement. If miners will report that mining works stable for a week (maybe less) then developer will be paid. This should be done with the escrow.

How do you guys think?