This is the codebase for the Helium miner container used on the Nebra hotspot miners.
We take the base image created by Helium from their Quay repo (built from the GitHub source) and make some customisations to optimise it for use on our hardware including adding a start script and a script to automatically determine the regulatory region (EU868, US915 etc) from the asserted location of the miner.
In the start-miner.sh script in this repo, you will see that we update the included sys.config file every time the miner container is loaded, using the below code:
wget \
-O "/opt/miner/releases/$HELIUM_GA_RELEASE/sys.config" \
"${OVERRIDE_CONFIG_URL}"Our Helium block tracker automatically creates miner snapshots every ~240 blocks and at the same time also updates a docker.config file located on our server with the block height and hash of the snapshot, enabling it to be ingested into the miner.
This enables our miners to sync extremely fast (called "instant sync" by some manufacturers) by downloading very up to date snapshots... ~240 blocks is considered synced to all intents and purposes and usually is close enough to being synced that it will already be able to submit transactions to the current consensus group. Note that this is worst case scenario - as the snapshot is updated every 4 hours - so it will often be more up to date than ~240 blocks (unless you are right at the end of a 4 hour period).
Note: since Helium moved all miners over to the light miner software, there is no longer syncing required and so "instant sync" and "snapshots" are no longer used.
RASPBERRYPI_MINER_CONFIG_URL, PISCES_MINER_CONFIG_URL, PYCOM_MINER_CONFIG_URL, ROCKPI_MINER_CONFIG_URL and 5G_MINER_CONFIG_URL are used to load the correct
helium/miner sys.config file. On the TESTNET fleets we use https://helium-assets-stage.nebra.com/docker.config as opposed to https://helium-assets.nebra.com/docker.config on the main fleets. For Pycom, Pisces, ROCK Pi and 5G we append .pycom, .pisces, .rockpi or .5g to the end of the URL.
We have set 2 variables related to garbage collection to help improve the storage usage and performance of miners.
BLOCKCHAIN_ROCKSDB_GC_BYTES Which is being set as an environment variable in the dockerfile
blocks_to_protect_from_gc Which is being set in sys.config under the blockchain block config
The values we have used for these 2 are the following: blocks_to_protect_from_gc is set to 4000 to give it some good buffer without removing too many blocks on GC trigger and BLOCKCHAIN_ROCKSDB_GC_BYTES is set to 8GB which means it will prioritze cleaning up files
blocks_to_protect_from_gc is being set in hm-block-tracker here
- Create a new branch
- Edit the first line of
Dockerfileto point to the new GA release - Push and create a new PR
Mr Bump is a GitHub bot we created to automate some tasks related to the miner software. This includes updating the miner to the latest GA (and tagging / releasing this update) as well as updating the necessary docker-compose.yml files.
Mr Bump is currently used in the following repos:
This repo automatically builds docker containers and uploads them to two repositories for easy access:
The images are tagged using the docker long and short commit SHAs for that release with architecture arm64 or amd64 as a prefix. The current version deployed to miners can be found in the helium-miner-software repo.