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Trying Out the Autotuning Function of Braiins OS+ on AntMiner S9

31, Mar 2020

One of the most interesting features of the brand new Braiins OS+ firmware for Antminer S9 ASIC miners is the auto-tuning functionality that automates per-chip overclocking in order to maximize performance for the available power and temperature conditions in order to increase the performance of your available miners. Since we already had a couple of S9 ASIC miners that used older release on the Braiins OS we did a quick and easy upgrade offer SSH to the latest Braiins OS+ release and decided to do a quick test of the auto-tuning feature. We remind you that the OS+ version is not completely open source and “free” like the normal Braiins OS, but it is the one that features the auto-tuning option. Braiins OS+ has a 2% developer fee built-in as a means to help further development, but thanks to the auto tuning feature you should be able to squeeze some extra performance to cover the fee and still be better than manual or stock settings.

We started our testing by disabling the temperature control and forcing the fans to operate at 100% all the time in order to ensure that the cooling performance will be at maximum level all the time for these air cooled S9 miners. Then we have set the PSU power limit to 1500W and started waiting for the automated script to do its magic in finding what the optimal settings would be for all of the chips in the ASIC miner and what will be the final hashrate we are going to be getting in a while from this stock 14 THS SHA256 ASIC miner. Do note that you are not actually required to specify a power limit of the PSU that the autotuning algorithm can take into account in order to maximize the TH/W produced by the mining device, but that can help to ensure that you will not have problems caused by the miner reaching the limits of the PSU you are using.

The result after leaving the auto-tuning to run a while on the miner showed the following result: 16.5-16.6 THS hashrate within the set power limit of 1500W and operating temperatures of the chips trying to stay below 90 degrees Celsius with the cooling fans operating at 100%. We should also note that even though the firmware may do per-chip optimizations for best results, the web-based interface does not provide you with detailed per-chip information, you still get a somewhat summarized hash chains information. We are not sure how long it may take for the auto-tuning to finish or of it actually finishes or tries to find optimal settings when operating conditions change… it is just not well documented for the moment, but it does seem to be working pretty well based on our first experience using it. Of course depending on a lot of conditions the results you will be getting from the auto-tuning feature may vary from miner to miner, so do not expect to see the same improvement on all of your available S9 miners!

– For more information and to download and try the new Braiins OS and OS+…

New Braiins OS and Braiins OS+ Firmware for Antminer S9 ASICs

31, Mar 2020

There is a new major release of the Braiins OS open source miner firmware for Bitmain’s most popular S9 series of ASIC miners available now. In fact there are now two different versions available Braiins OS community edition and Braiins OS+ enterprise edition, both available for free, with a different feature set and some specifics we’ll cover in a moment. You can use the new Braiins OS or OS+ to replace the original Bitmain firmware on Antminer S9, S9i and S9j and soon hopefully the newer S17 and T17 models will also be supported along with other devices in the future. Braiins OS is fully open-source and customizable so you can tweak it to fit your needs, it supports AsicBoost, supports Stratum V1 and V2 implementation, uses a custom BOSminer developed from scratch in Rust and provides some extra useful features that can help you tweak your ASIC miners and get more of your hardware. The Braiins OS community edition is completely free and open-source without the need to pay for it or any developer fees, unlike the case with some other custom firmware solutions.

The new Braiins OS+ enterprise edition is built on top of the standard community editions and has some extra features available, most interesting of which are the auto-tuning feature to increase hashrate and the low power mode for maximum efficiency as well as the pre-heat option. The rest is like in the standard edition, but the extra features allow you to tweak even better your performance or energy efficiency, depending on your specific needs. The small catch with the Braiins OS+ enterprise edition is that for the extra features you get you will have to agree to the 2% built-in developer fee, however you will also get a 50% reduction (from 2% to 1%) of the pool fee if you use the miners with Braiins OS+ on the Slush Pool for mining. Thanks to the auto-tuning feature in which algorithms automatically evaluate the optimal frequencies for hashing chip-by-chip, instead of treating the entire machine as one single unit the extra performance you may get from a miner should be much more than the fee that you will need to pay.

– For more information and to download and try the new Braiins OS and OS+…

New Braiins OS Cobalt Release With Manual Fan Control Available

30, Jan 2019

The Braiins OS is an alternative opensource OS for Bitcoin ASIC miners and more specifically for Antminer S9 and DragonMint T1 with support for AsicBoost. The initial release was not that easy to install and use, but looked very promising, but in December last year the second major version named Braiins OS Cobalt was made available and it made things much easier for everyone to switch from the factory firmware. The initial Cobalt release however was missing a crucial feature as we have noted and that was manual fan control as by default the automatic control was keeping high operating temperatures and fans spinning at lower RPM. This has been fixed in the new second release along with some more useful features and improvements worth upgrading to the new release or switching from the stock firmware. If you want to read the full list of what is new in the latest Braiins OS Cobalt release.

In the latest version you have the option to use either Automatic Fan Control or set Fixed Fan Speed. In automatic mode you can set the desired temperature and the fan controller will try to keep as close as possible to that temperature by varying the fan speed. The fixed speed mode is set in percentage and the fans will operate at the set value regardless of the temperature, so you need to be careful with this mode, though setting at 100% target fan speed should be pretty safe. Do note that the operating temperature depends not only on the cooling fans of the miner, but also on the ambient air temperatures and other factors.

Another new interesting feature is the new frequency scaling mode that is essentially an overclocking multiplier allowing you to set an overclock by a constant factor for all of the miner chains at once over the overclock settings you may have individually set already. Overclocking is easier in the new release as you are able to lower the temperatures by manually controlling the fan speeds now thus getting more headroom for overclocking. When overclocking also make sure that not only the cooling can handle things, but also the power supply you are using is sufficient enough as well, especially if you start increasing the operating voltages as well and not only the frequencies.

– For more details about the new Braiins OS Cobalt release for S9 and T1 ASIC miners…


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