Topic: New firmware for antminer S9 - less power consumption - page 2. (Read 25235 times)

I thinks work for just copy Bmminer at miner by SSH .... But just try

How did you know you had a C5 board? All the old s9's with C5 boards I've tried the firmware on refuse to run the firmware.

After yesterday's two failures, I've just tried the new 27/11/2018 S9i FW on a 3rd miner - a S9i 13.5Th/s.   Same result - certainly it reduced power consumption (roughly from the PDU meter by around 1 to 2 amps at 230v) but it also reduced the hashrate by 5 Th/s.  

It's hopeless - it's as if Bitmain didn't even test it on a single miner, let alone many.  I've tested it with LPM ticked and unticked - no difference.

It sets the voltage to 8v on all boards rather the higher different voltages depending on each board's quality.  It also takes longer to boot because it goes through the game of setting the voltages starting at 9.40v and decrements 0.1v at a time as below - it does this sequence twice at reboot (before and after it sets the chain freq).  Complete waste of time - as it is always going to be the same answer i.e. 8.00v.  This new firmware is terrible code.


It then sets the board freq much lower than it's base.  This is the best board - the other two got even lower 4nn speeds.


You can see the low hashrate compared to the other miners on the earlier asicboost FW in the image below.  Also as you can see every 5 or 10 minutes all the 189 chips disappear.   The HW error rate is also much higher than the 4 identical S9i's underneath it in the table.

There is one advantage to this FW - temps are 10 degrees less and the fans should last a long time - they're barely moving.  

https://imgur.com/mrewNnm

Finally now the HW errors shown next to each board no longer add up to the total.  According to this FW 8+1=111    See image below.

https://imgur.com/8c9TbMS

update on this models:

with this firmware Antminer-S9-LPM-20181102.tar I'm getting a stable 13,6 TH/s on 1.250 W from the wall and temp chips from 66 to 69 C°

ahh, I take back what I said - I was not aware of the 11/27 version - I am running the one from 11/07

I just tried this new Antminer-S9i-xilinx-201811271554-autofreq-user-Update2UBI-NF.tar.gz on a S9i 14 and a S9i 13.5.    Very bad results for both of them - it certainly reduced the power considerably  on both of them and as a result also hugely reduced the hash rate from 14 to 9.5 and 13.5 to 7.5.   Plus because of the low chain voltage it was clocking up lots of HW errors.   So I obviously flashed them both back to the 201811071119 FW.

The only difference in the firmware that I can see is that it introduces a new chain backup voltage of 8.00v for all boards that (at least on the 2 miners I tested) is overriding the voltages stored on each boards PIC controller e.g. the PICs have 8.9v, 8.9v & 8.7v on one of my S9i 13.5s - hence the significantly lower power, rubbish hash-rate and increased HW errors.  e.g. the only frequency my S9i 14.0 could manage to get up to was 493 instead of it's normal 650.  Even worse because it was clocking errors and didn't seem stable at 8v, the real RT hash-rate was a lot less than the ideal (which is based on the freq) e.g. on a S9i 13.5, RT = 7500, Ideal = 9500  - RT was around 13650 before this FW - so it's only hashing at 55% of it's normal rate.

I'm not sure why Bitmain released a second asicboost FW for the S9i's or what the difference is between the two versions - nothing on Twitter etc - anyone seen a Bitmain explanation anywhere?  The description next to the firmware has changed from

"1. Reduce power consumption."  

to

 "1. Add support for low power mode, reduce power consumption".    

I think a few of us of assumed that the LPM option didn't do anything on the initial asciboost FWs.  Maybe Bitmain have enabled it now.   Maybe unticking LPM on the General Settings screen will stop it selecting the very low (and unstable) backup voltage - it's late here - so I'll try one tomorrow. Stryfe - you said yours are hashing normally - did you have LPM ticked?  

If this is meant to be a more efficient Low Power Mode, it's not working for me as the % drop in hashrate is more then the drop in power so it's less efficient, more unstable and I'd need to install more miners to get my total hash-rate back to where it was before.
 
I didn't unplug any miners to check the precise power drop, but the PDU amps dropped by around 1.5a (350w) - which won't be precise because there are other miners on that PDU.

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You can't adjust the frequencies on the S9i/j's with Bitmain firmware - there are no fixed freq FWs listed for these miners.  There are other ways of doing it with 3rd party firmware.  Also there is no dependency on the prior firmware as you mention with this LPM update.

The S9i and S9j asicboost FWs are complete replacement firmware's - so they will just totally overwrite the previous firmware.  If you look at the various FW sizes for the S9 and S9i/j it is obvious.  My posts earlier in this thread explaining about applying the LPM FW on top of a fixed FW only applied to the S9 - which only had a small "patch" LPM FW upgrade which was applied "on top".   It doesn't work that way for the S9i/j - unless someone wants to risk trying the S9 firmware's on the S9i/j's.

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Almost certainly (99.9%) you an on a slightly older version of Antminer-S9-all-201711171757-autofreq-user-Update2UBI-NF.tar.gz.  

This is the autotune / autofreq FW.  You don't have to load any other firmware first unless you want to try over-clocking your miner - so just go ahead and apply the S9 LPM firmware i.e.  Antminer-S9-LPM-20181102.tar.gz, although it would be better to get your miner up-to-date first by flashing it with Antminer-S9-all-201711171757-autofreq-user-Update2UBI-NF.tar.gz if you want to stay on autotune before applying the LPM update.

If you want to be absolutely sure what FW you are you can post your full kernel log and I'll be able to confirm 100%.

I think I lost what you are asking - you stated "If he proposed something new" - do you mean Bitmain?

Yes of course, I knew that very well lol I just wanted to know if he proposed something new;)

such as? LPM is as simple as that, LPM only - if you want to adjust freq and such, that still has to be done the same way as it was done before and is also dependent upon which firmware you install prior to the LPM update.

Any additional option ?

I have tried it on both the S9i and S9j and have zero issues so far. they are hashing same as before - I do not have a way to measure power consumption though other than waiting for the months bill to see if it drops.

UP ! Bitmain Release new firmware for S9I / S9J and say :

"Add support for low power mode, reduce power consumption."

Any people try it ?

Maybe its the autotune then...
I had the autotune on some, and they were underclocked... Ranging from 12.7 to 13.5 on 13.5 S9's

So, i did what most advised: flash the 650 fixed frequency. This gives unstable outcomes...

I dont want my miners to hash slower.... So no autotune for me...

My updates went fine for my s9i and s9 auto tune. No issues, hash rates are good 13.7 and 14.

All n all i have flashed almost all my miners to the 650ff fw and the LMP fw on top of it.
My personal findings, are that this firmware is nice, it saves some power, but its verrrry buggy still.
I have miners that wont mine stable, miners that wont run due being too cold, miners that wont simply connect to some pools, some run fine for 3 days, but wont do a thing anymore after a reboot (for whatever reason)

So, in the end, saving a few watts is nice, but it comes with a high price in time and effort to set it up, but also to keep it running afterwards.

Same thing can be done with Taserz S9 rocket mod firmware (no DEV fee) and it works a lot more stable...

Strange that Bitmain can't seem to get it to work...

Hello, I have difficulty determining which firmware I am currently / Photo 1 shows the screen on my S9 13.5 / and whether I need to install any of the updates shown on picture 2 before installing the latest ASIC Boost Update ...

photo 1: https://i.imgur.com/xylq9CS.jpg

photo 2: https://i.imgur.com/QvBKGln.jpg

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Hi, with a lot of fiddling i got it to work again.

What my findings are, is that the miners with lpm firmware dont seem to like very low temperatures. Anyone can confirm?
Hashrate is slowing down, becomes erratic, and finally it shows that its hashing but its not, giving a temp on the first board of 15 degrees centigrade...
My other miners that are in a confined space thats a little warmer, i dont have these issues.

My findings are for 3 miners now (out of 4, that are colder) and i have about 6 that are in a warmer spot.

Anyone that has the same issues?

edit: i flashed them with 650 freq. firmware, and lpm 02-11 on top of it. Highest setting i get them to work with, is 668mhz on one, and most of the others at 662. few 650 only.

Hi - From your varying fan speed results and your partial kernel log with PWM value of 50, your miner is clearly still on auto-tune fan speeds - so it is ignoring your manual fan settings - which should never happen.   That's strange as the "fixed-fan-speed" is standard Bitmain functionality that is available on all of the S9 firmware - all my "hack" did was to to make the manual option temporarily visible on the Miner Config page.   So I suspect something else has changed on your miner - e.g. the line in the kernel log about "no temp offset" value found stored in the pic controller doesn't look right for a normal S9, although that alone isn't the obvious cause as the software then did a fix and obtained a reasonable looking offset.   But it is suspicious nonetheless.   Did you "back out" the previous edits that you did to bmminer.conf or start from a clean firmware install before setting the manual speeds?   Although your bmminer.conf edit didn't appear to work, it may still have made some unpredictable changes.  

So, if you haven't already tried it, perhaps re-flash with a clean fixed-650 firmware (and LPM of course) and retry the fixed fan settings.  Or for even more "belt & braces" you could try a factory reset and re-flash firmware etc.   As mentioned manual fan control is a standard built-in (but hidden) Bitmain function so it should always work on any S9.

You need to flash the firmware with the 650 firmware. This is the firmware that allows for fixed FREQ changes, the one that mine came with was on auto FREQ so each time I changed the FREQ it would revert. But once I flashed it with the 650 Firmware, I was able to make the changes to the FREQ and saved on reboot. Then I applied the LPM update for giggles.

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Another user mentioned this on page 10:


This makes sense, because when you flash a firmware from prior releases the settings were defaulted, but with LPM my settings were never changed.  Hope that makes sense.  I was confused at first as well, since I never flashed my firmware until just this week, and I've had my miner for almost 11 months now.

hi,
i see several post' of installing the LPM fw on top of FW "xxx".

Am i mistaken, as i thought the LPM firmware is a complete new firmware on its own? No need to pre-install any other firmware before this one?

If so, witch fw is the best to install before upgrading to the new LPM firmware?

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How did you increase the frequency? When i try the advanced menu and set a higher freq, the miner restarts naturally but goes to its same old "low" hashrate back...