Posts Tagged ‘Bitmain’

How to Update the Firmware on Problematic Bitmain Antminer E3 Miners

23, Apr 2020

Last month Bitmain has released an updated firmware for their Antminer E3 miners to extend their life for mining Ethereum Classic (ETC) and Ethereum (ETH) with the approach of 4GB DAG sizes, however a lot of users had issues updating all devices successfully. Errors preventing the proper update to the fixed firmware such as:

413 - Request Entity Too Large

or

mount: mounting ubi1:rootfs on /mnt/config failed: Invalid argument mkdir: can't create directory '/mnt/config/home/usr_config': No such file or directory cp: can't create '/mnt/config/home/usr_config/': No such file or directory umount: can't umount /mnt/config: Invalid argument mount: mounting ubi1:rootfs on /mnt/upgrade failed: No such file or directory runme.sh: cd: line 122: can't cd to /mnt/upgrade/upgrade umount: can't umount /mnt/upgrade: No such file or directory

The easiest method we have found that works 100% in a couple of Antminer E3 miners that we had issues updating remotely via the web interface of the devices is to flash the SD card recovery firmware and then update normally with the latest fixed firmware. The only drawback for this method is that you need to have physical access to the E3 miners as you cannot do the SD card recovery procedure remotely unfortunately.

Here is a quick guide on how to updated problematic E3 miners:
– Download the E3-SD-20180806-pool.zip SD card recovery firmware file from Bitman
– Have a handy 4-8GB micro-SD flash card (larger capacity should work but is not needed), format it with FAT32 file system and extract the contents of the E3-SD-20180806-pool.zip archive on the card
– Insert the SD card into the slot at the back of the Antminer E3 device (it should be powered off)
– You need to open the control board of the miner and switch the position of the jumper labeled JP4 and then power on the device
– Wait for about a minute until you see the red and green LEDs on the control board start blinking together
– Power down the Antminer S3, revert the position of the JP4 jumper to its original place, remove the SD card and insert the control board back on its place
– Power on the miner, wait for it to boot (it will have the default configuration settings) and go to Upgrade to flash the latest fixed firmware
– You can download the latest fixed firmware for Antminer E3 here – E3_V540_0327.tar.gz
– Wait for the flash procedure to finish and the miner to reboot, set your mining pool and wallet address in the configuration settings and you should be ready to mine normally once again until the DAG size for ETH and ETC reaches very close to 4GB that is…

New NBMiner 29.0 With Support for The New KAWPOW PoW Algorithm

3, Apr 2020

The latest NBMiner 29.0 update comes with added support for the KAWPOW algorithm that is going to soon be used by RavenCoin (RVN)… most likely. The KAWPAW algorithm is based on ProgPoW with some parameters specific for Ravencoin, so a regular ProgPow miner won’t do. So now, besides the official kawpowminer and the recently released Gminer with KAWPOW support you also have a third alternative in the form of the latest NBMiner and others will most likely follow as well. It seems however that all of the miners could be based on the same reference ProgPow codebase and there is currently not much of a performance difference apparently, so it is more like which one you are more used to. Below you can see an official list of the expected performance on popular mining GPUs at default stock settings for the KAWPOW algorithm when using NBMiner:

NBMiner 29.0 KAWPOW Expected Performance:
– Nvidia P106-100: 10.3 MH/S
– Nvidia P104-8G: 17.5 MH/S
– Nvidia GTX 1070 Ti: 13.3 MH/s
– Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti: 22.5 MH/s
– Nvidia GTX 2080: 25.8 MH/s
– AMD Radeon RX 580: 10.3 MH/s

We remind you that the NBMiner is a closed source GPU miner for Nvidia CUDA and now AMD as well that is available for both Windows and Linux operating systems and it has the following developer fee built-in: tensority_ethash 3%, tensority(Pascal) 2%, tensority(Turing) 3%, ethash 0.65%, cuckaroo & cuckatoo & cuckaroo_swap 2%, progpow_sero 2%, sipc 2%, bfc 3%, hns 2%, hns_ethash 3%, trb 2%, trb_ethash 3%, kawpow 2%.

– To download and try the latest NBMiner 29.0 Nvidia and AMD GPU Miner for Windows/Linux…

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+…


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