ethminer

Ethereum miner with OpenCL, CUDA and stratum support

The ethminer is an Ethereum GPU mining worker. This is the actively maintained version of ethminer. It originates from cpp-ethereum project (where GPU mining has been discontinued) and builds on the improvements made in Genoil's fork. See FAQ for more details.

Features

• OpenCL mining
• Nvidia CUDA mining
• realistic benchmarking against arbitrary epoch/DAG/blocknumber
• on-GPU DAG generation (no more DAG files on disk)
• stratum mining without proxy
• OpenCL devices picking
• farm failover (getwork + stratum)

Table of Contents

• Install
• Usage
• Build
  • Continuous Integration and development builds
  • Building from source
  • CMake configuration options
• Maintainer
• Contribute
• F.A.Q.

Install

Standalone executables for Linux, macOS and Windows are provided in the Releases section. Download an archive for your operating system and unpack the content to a place accessible from command line. The ethminer is ready to go.

Usage

The ethminer is a command line program. This means you launch it either from a Windows command prompt or Linux console, or create shortcuts to predefined command lines using a Linux Bash script or Windows batch/cmd file. For a full list of available command, please run

ethminer --help

Build

Continuous Integration and development builds

CI	OS	Status	Development builds
Travis CI	Linux, macOS		✗ No build artifacts, Amazon S3 is needed for this
AppVeyor	Windows		✓ Build artifacts available for all PRs and branches

The AppVeyor system automatically builds a Windows .exe for every commit. The latest version is always available on the landing page or you can browse the history to access previous builds.

To download the .exe on a build under 'JOB NAME' select 'Configuration: Release', choose 'ARTIFACTS' then download the zip file.

Building from source

This project uses CMake and Hunter package manager.

1. Create a build directory.

   mkdir build; cd build

2. Configure the project with CMake. Check out additional configuration options.

   cmake ..

3. Build the project using CMake Build Tool Mode. This is a portable variant of make.

   cmake --build .

4. (Optional, Linux only) Install the built executable.

   sudo make install

OpenCL support on Linux

If you're planning to use OpenCL on Linux you have to install OpenGL libraries. E.g. on Ubuntu run:

sudo apt-get install mesa-common-dev

Disable Hunter

If you want to install dependencies yourself or use system package manager you can disable Hunter by adding -DHUNTER_ENABLED=OFF to configuration options.

CMake configuration options

Pass these options to CMake configuration command, e.g.

cmake .. -DETHASHCUDA=ON -DETHASHCL=OFF

• -DETHASHCL=ON - enable OpenCL mining, ON by default,
• -DETHASHCUDA=ON - enable CUDA mining, OFF by default,
• -DETHSTRATUM=ON - build with Stratum protocol support, ON by default.

Maintainer

• Paweł Bylica @chfast

Contribute

To meet the community, ask general questions and chat about ethminer join the ethminer channel on Gitter.

All bug reports, pull requests and code reviews are very much welcome.

F.A.Q

1. Why is my hashrate with Nvidia cards on Windows 10 so low?

   The new WDDM 2.x driver on Windows 10 uses a different way of addressing the GPU. This is good for a lot of things, but not for ETH mining. For Kepler GPUs: I actually don't know. Please let me know what works best for good old Kepler. For Maxwell 1 GPUs: Unfortunately the issue is a bit more serious on the GTX750Ti, already causing suboptimal performance on Win7 and Linux. Apparently about 4MH/s can still be reached on Linux, which, depending on ETH price, could still be profitable, considering the relatively low power draw. For Maxwell 2 GPUs: There is a way of mining ETH at Win7/8/Linux speeds on Win10, by downgrading the GPU driver to a Win7 one (350.12 recommended) and using a build that was created using CUDA 6.5. For Pascal GPUs: You have to use the latest WDDM 2.1 compatible drivers in combination with Windows 10 Anniversary edition in order to get the full potential of your Pascal GPU.

2. Why is a GTX 1080 slower than a GTX 1070?

   Because of the GDDR5X memory, which can't be fully utilized for ETH mining (yet).

3. Are AMD cards also affected by slowdowns with increasing DAG size?

   Only GCN 1.0 GPUs (78x0, 79x0, 270, 280), but in a different way. You'll see that on each new epoch (30K blocks), the hashrate will go down a little bit.

4. Can I still mine ETH with my 2GB GPU?

   No.

5. What are the optimal launch parameters?

   The default parameters are fine in most scenario's (CUDA). For OpenCL it varies a bit more. Just play around with the numbers and use powers of 2. GPU's like powers of 2.

6. What does the --cuda-parallel-hash flag do?

   @davilizh made improvements to the CUDA kernel hashing process and added this flag to allow changing the number of tasks it runs in parallel. These improvements were optimised for GTX 1060 GPUs which saw a large increase in hashrate, GTX 1070 and GTX 1080/Ti GPUs saw some, but less, improvement. The default value is 4 (which does not need to be set with the flag) and in most cases this will provide the best performance.

7. What is ethminer's relationship with Genoil's fork?

   Genoil's fork was the original source of this version, but as Genoil is no longer consistently maintaining that fork it became almost impossible for developers to get new code merged there. In the interests of progressing development without waiting for reviews this fork should be considered the active one and Genoil's as legacy code.