Topic: OFFICIAL CGMINER mining software thread for linux/win/osx/mips/arm/r-pi 4.11.0 - page 543. (Read 5806088 times)

I'm confused as to why the port would change.  My experience with various removable serial ports (USB and otherwise, spanning at least 4 or 5 different device drivers) in Windows is that the enumerate the same consistently so long as they are plugged in the exact same port.  IOW, as long as any hubs are connected/initialized in the same order (so that the USB ports are still addressed the same) and the same singles are connected to the same USB ports, the same serial port numbers should be used.  Unless something is different about the controller BFL uses, the serial port numbers shouldn't change (Windows would need to think the same controller was plugged into a different port or a different controller was plugged into the same port when that hadn't happened).  I could see a mini-rig having a problem with address consistency if the chained hubs get detected in a different order, but I've never seen that happen with built-in ports or single hubs on a desktop or laptop.  Am I missing something?

In that case I'm thinking windows isn't closing / reopening the port properly.

Edit:
Yeah, a quick look suggests that a wait between closing and reopening may help.

For what it's worth, I'm pulling the plug on the power (the laptop that's running cgminer keeps running on batteries).  When I restart cgminer, it's still using the same serial ports (specified on the command line with -S).

... and anyone looking for an Xubuntu 11.04 compile of 2.5.0
-> cgminer-2.5.0a at the top of https://github.com/kanoi/cgminer/downloads
(I'm running this executable at the moment on both my rigs)

I found this too. My config file had 95 set for my two GPUs, then nothing more specified. by default, it should set any remaining devices to 95, but it didn't. I'm thinking it set it to 0. Anyway, I removed the conf. line and it worked fine.

Check your configuration file or command line doesn't have temperature parameters for GPU(s), and that zero is being used for the BFL.

Anyone else having a problem of cgminer saying their BFL is over the heat threshold when it's only at 45C and stopping work on it?

Thanks!

I compiled 2.5.0 for windows and I'm running it for a pair of BFL Singles.  So far so good.

I did try a test by pulling the plug on the Singles to see if they'd recover after being plugged back in, but no luck on that, yet.


I added some exit(1)'s after some of those error messages in driver-bitforce.c as a hack so it can stop & restart.  Maybe not applicable for most people, though.

Thanks for this work Con. You are the best in the business. I have cgminer 2.5.0 running on 14 singles and 3 mini rigs without issue.

M

Alas, it's not like I actually own a minirig, but some generous donating and temporary remote access allowed me to work on the code for it. Note that this was a laptop connected to 2 minirigs, each with 17 devices in it. The silicon quality apparently varies from device to device which is why they're 2 speeds in this example. Note that this machine was generating 50Ghash, with an efficiency over 9000  and the CPU usage was recording 1%.

New Version: 2.5.0 - 6th July 2012

New version number signifying the updated BFL hardware support. Non-bfl miners have only bugfixes since 2.4.4.

Human readable changelog:

- Bitforce minirig support - including support for use on p2pool through use of the --bfl-range option, provided you have a new enough minirig that supports the nonce-range feature. By default this feature is disabled because it costs ~1% in hashrate, but given the massive loss of hashes you would otherwise have mining on p2pool, this is worth using. Other miners should leave it disabled.
- Huge update to other bitforce device. I've merged all of p_shep's changes into this code (thanks!). These can reenable devices, time out gracefully and mark them sick/overheated and so on.
- I've also created my own workaround for the biggest problem with existing bitforce devices - the can now abort work as soon as a longpoll hits which means literally half as much work on average wasted across longpoll than previously, and a much lower reject rate. Note these devices are still inefficient across longpoll since they don't even have the support the minirig devices have - and they never will according to bfl. This means you should never mine with them on p2pool.
- Fixed the dynamic GPU intensity behaviour which was getting stuck at -10 on faster GPUs.
- Updated API code with lots of changes under the hood courtesy of Kano, and updated miner.php.

Full changelog:

- Fix --benchmark not working since the dynamic addition of pools and pool
stats.
- Make disabling BFL nonce range support a warning since it has to be explicitly
enabled on the command line now.
- miner.php allow renaming table headers
- Make bitforce nonce range support a command line option --bfl-range since
enabling it decrease hashrate by 1%.
- Add sanity checking to make sure we don't make sleep_ms less than 0 in
bitforce.
- The fastest minirig devices need a significantly smaller starting sleep time.
- Use a much shorter initial sleep time to account for faster devices and nonce
range working, and increase it if nonce range fails to work.
- Use nmsleep instead of usleep in bitforce.
- Provide a ms based sleep function that uses nanosleep to avoid the inaccuracy
of usleep on SMP systems.
- delay_time_ms is always set so need not be initialised in bitforce.
- Increase bitforce timeout to 10 seconds.
- Add more hysteresis and poll ~5 times to allow for timer delays in bitforce
devices.
- miner.php allow alternating line colours (off by default)
- Display the actual duration of wait when it is greater than the cutoff.
- Set nonce to maximum once we determine nonce range support is broken.
- Initial wait time is always known so no need to zero it beforehand in
bitforce.
- No point counting wait time until the work is actually sent to bitforce
devices.
- Use string comparison functions instead of explicit comparisons.
- Account for wait_ms time when nonce_range is in use on BFL.
- Split nonces up into 1/5 chunks when nonce range is supported.
- limit clear buffer iterations.
- Ad fd check to clear buffer.
- miner.php remove incorrect 'DATE' error message
- miner.php allow summary header in custom pages
- Disable nonce range support in BFL when broken support is detected.
- Restart_wait is only called with a ms value so incorporate that into the
function.
- Only try to adjust dev width when curses is built in.
- miner.php define custom sum fields as a simple array
- Fix off-by-one error in nonce increment in bfl.
- Use BE when setting nonce in bitforce nonce range work.
- Enable nonce range in the normal init sequence for bfl.
- Queue extra work at 2/3 differently depending on whether we're using nonce
range or not.
- Initially enable support for nonce range support on bfl, splitting nonces up
into 3/4 size and only disable it if it fails on work submit.
- Attempt to detect nonce range support in BFL by sending work requring its
support.
- Limit retrying on busy for up to BITFORCE_TIMEOUT_MS
- Attempt to initialise while bitforce device returns BUSY.
- Extend length of string that can be passed to BFL devices.
- Fix signedness warning.
- Adjust device width column to be consistent.
- Use cgpu-> not gpus[] in watchdog thread.
- Add api stats (sleep time)
- Timing tweaks Added long and short timeouts, short for detecting throttling,
long to give up totally. Reset sleep time when device re-initialised Still check
results after timeout Back up a larger time if result on first poll.
- Add API Notify counter 'Comms Error'
- Style police on api.c
- Do all logging outside of the bitforce mutex locking to avoid deadlocks.
- Remove applog call from bfwrite to prevent grabbing nested mutexes.
- Bitforce style changes.
- Minor style changes.
- Remove needless roundl define.
- Made JSON error message verbose.
- Fine-tune timing adjustment. Also remove old work_restart timing.
- Check for gpu return times of >= 0, not just 0, to fix intensity dropping to
-10.
- Restart is zeroed in the mining thread so no need to do it inside the bitforce
code.
- More improvements to comms. BFL return nothing when throttling, so should not
be considered an error. Instead repeat with a longer delay.
- Polling every 10ms there's not much point checking the pthread_cond_timedwait
as it just adds overhead. Simply check the value of work_restart in the bfl main
polling loop.
- Use a pthread conditional that is broadcast whenever work restarts are
required. Create a generic wait function waiting a specified time on that
conditional that returns if the condition is met or a specified time passed to
it has elapsed. Use this to do smarter polling in bitforce to abort work, queue
more work, and check for results to minimise time spent working needlessly.
- Add busy time to wait time.
- api.c put version up to 1.14
- Add tiny delay after writing to BFL Change BFL errors to something more human
readable Send work busy re-tries after 10ms delay

lulz ...
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1011546

Figured it out:

Win 7 would say it was downloading the BFL driver, but it wasn't actually doing something correct with it. I installed the BFL driver and all of the devices received COM numbers. Using -S COM# would only get six devices running in cgminer. I did some searching and found:


With all of the COM numbers put in all 10 devices were found and are now currently hashing.

I just went and purchased a 4 port powered USB hub to test out if my 10 port was an issue along with some hardware to reassemble my 10th single. Out of the four singles attached to the new hub zero will start in cgminer. Using multiple rear USB 2/3 ports for the hub has no change. This almost added to the issues as now one of the BFL singles is not being assigned a COM number (Com 38, 39 ,Blank, 41). It should be 40, but that will not work either. With the four port hub added to the system I can now only get 5 singles to start in cgminer. This is pretty much driving me insane.

Yep those instructions are part of cgminer:
https://github.com/ckolivas/cgminer/blob/master/windows-build.txt

Yay, just compiled my own win32 2.4.4 with icarus support and no ocl adl etc.

Used the instructions here : http://pastebin.com/3pzivj32

Worked first time, happy camper.  Now I can copy the binaries onto my intel integrated devices and not have the usual no-sdk issues.

kind regards

Window size is already set to 87x56. I've tried increasing it upto 90x80, but it has no effect.

Pictures:

With 2.4.4 it detects 2 specific problems and displays a message:
1) Do not have user privileges required to open %s
2) %s is already in use by another process
If you are not getting either of those messages, then running cgminer also with the -D option it will give you a message why it can't start some of your BFLs

However, I guess the fix might be one of:
1) Try using "\\.\COMn" (not just "COMn") if you aren't already
2) use "bitforce:\\.\COMn" for all the devices (<- this is the most likely fix on Win 7 64bit)