ScalaMiner

ScalaMiner is a Scala/JVM implementation of several mining abilities available through software such as CGMiner and BFGMiner. This mining platform will give you a single performant process that can handle all of your mining device needs. Compatible with popular LTC/Scrypt and BTC/SHA256 mining devices (and more in the works), ScalaMiner will give you a stable, unified, cross-platform solution. It utilizes Akka actors for concurrency and usb4java/libusb for usb device control.

Goals

• Provide a performant but fault-tolerant implementation of popular miner control.
• Provide a portable and modular platform for mining device control, in which new driver implementation is neither destructive nor incompatible with existing drivers.
• Provide a more efficient and performant stratum proxy for older devices.
• Provide a durable hot-swap system that is tolerant of device failures. No more segfaults or disabled devices!
• Utilize reactive programming principles to reduce overhead and enhance scalability.
• Implement functionality in a distributed way that will take advantage of multi-core systems.
• Support ARM devices, and keep a small RAM footprint (less than 100 MB)
• Minimize kernel load to improve latency with USB and network devices.
• Provide support for alternate JVMs (currently only tested in HotSpot 1.7 for ARM and x64)

Libraries

• scrypt - Offers a pluggable native driver for extra performance
• usb4java - requires libusb native driver. See their instructions on how to compile it if the included drivers are broken or don’t include your platform.
• io.Usb - A fully reactive implementation of libusb using the akka.io framework, written specifically for ScalaMiner. Currently unpublished, but the code is available in this repo.
• Akka - Amazingly strong actor-based concurrency platform for Scala/Java.
• Spray - Akka actor based HTTP library using the akka.io framework.
• SLF4J

Benefits

Akka actors provide a controlled mutability context within a parallel processing environment. This allows reactive principles to be implemented while relying on sequential access patterns for mutable data. This ultimately gives us an environment in which we can update state while seamlessly operating in a multi-threaded process. This functional distribution of concurrency units allows us to take advantage of a multi-core environment while respecting cache-coherency and freeing ourselves from mutexes and wait states. While avoiding wait/blocking states, we’re able to keep a lower thread counts, reduce context-switching and thread stack overhead.

Devices

• Stratum Proxy - Implements a GetWork proxy that can be used with older devices to connect to a stratum pool. The fully concurrent proxy will give you much improved performance over the single-thread Python proxy by Slush.
• GridSeed DualMiner - Support for either dual LTC/BTC or single LTC/BTC. No special procedure for dual mode! Just configure both a scrypt and sha256 stratum, set the switch on the device, and plug it in. Dual mode is detected per-device by only the switch, enabling you to run some devices in dual and some in single, all from the same process.
• GridSeed 5-Chip 320kH/s ASIC GC3355 - Currently only LTC mode implemented (still trying to find non-conflicting specs). Supports finer incremental frequencies.
• Butterfly Labs BitForce SC - Single device only (no XLINK support). Has been tested with the 7.18 GH/s upgrade Jalapeno, should work with regular Jalapeno devices and the Little Singles.
• Bitmain AntMiner U1/U2
• ASICMiner Block Erupter USB
• BitFury RED/BLUE Fury, NanoFury

Hardware requests

The current device support for ScalaMiner is based on available access to mining hardware. If you are a hardware manufacturer/retailer/aficionado please file an issue request or contact me (colinrgodsey) otherwise to get the device support added!

Donations

Donations are greatly appreciated, but there are alternate ways to support the project. Hardware availability is the biggest factor limiting device support. If you are a HW owner and developer, obviously the best way to contribute would be to create the driver for it! Otherwise the best way to help is hardware donations and/or loans; this also tends to have a much quicker turnaround for development (who wants to leave unused HW sitting there?). Other remote development options may be available, but can be more inconvenient for each side. If you have questions or are interested in one of these contribution paths, open up a GitHub Issue or contact me (colinrgodsey) otherwise.

For classic coin donations, we accept BTC at 1HmmCUmGr1KYWRMosVa299z9NC9SRxyr8h

Compiling/Configuring/Running

• The project is managed with SBT. Running from source should be as simple as ./sbt run.
• To prepare a bundled jar, use ./sbt assembly. This will create a jar with all deps and the default config in reference.conf (override using application.conf in the base dir).
• See the Known Issues section below for instructions on how to compile the native driver if one of the provided ones doesn't work for you.
• Configuration is done using Typesafe Config. Refer to the reference.conf file for config fields/structure. Place your overrides in scalaminer.conf in the base directory. Make sure to configure your pools, or it uses the default (as seen in reference.conf)! See scalaminer.conf.example for a basic config.
• More info coming soon....

Known Issues

• libusb on OSX seems to have trouble sometimes (especially OSX 10.9). Look into compiling your own usb4java native driver, or help out the fine folks at libusb and/or usb4java diagnose the issue.
• No rules file for Debian/Ubuntu. Should be able to use the same one from cgminer and add your devices. Or just run the thing as root.
• OSX has lots of serial drivers for things, see OSXDRIVERS.md for info on unloading these. Some devices end up getting used by the HID drivers. There's almost no way around this currently.

Credits

Based on code from:

• cgminer by Con Kolivas: https://github.com/ckolivas/cgminer
• stratum mining proxy by Marek Palatinus: https://github.com/slush0/stratum-mining-proxy

License

ScalaMiner is offered as open source under GPL v3. Future licensing may allow closed-source implementations of plugins/drivers (different license for plugin/common libraries).