kawpow-metal

The first KAWPOW GPU miner for Apple Silicon. Mine Ravencoin (RVN) natively on Mac using Metal compute shaders.

Performance

Device	Hashrate
M1 Pro	6.3 MH/s
M1	~2.9 MH/s
M2/M3	TBD (should be faster)

Quick Start

git clone https://github.com/imperatormk/kawpow-metal.git
cd kawpow-metal
swift run kawpow-metal --pool rvnswap.xyz:3458 --worker YOUR_RVN_ADDRESS.rig01

That's it. No dependencies, no brew installs, no CUDA. Just Xcode command line tools.

Requirements

• macOS 15+ (Sequoia)
• Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3/M4)
• Xcode Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install)

Usage

Pool Mining (recommended)

swift run kawpow-metal --pool POOL_HOST:PORT --worker YOUR_ADDRESS.RIG_NAME

Example with our pool:

swift run kawpow-metal --pool rvnswap.xyz:3458 --worker RYourAddress.macbook

Solo Mining

Requires a running ravend with -miningaddress=YOUR_ADDRESS:

swift run kawpow-metal

Connects to 127.0.0.1:18766 (testnet) by default. Edit main.swift line 108 to change to mainnet port 8766.

Features

• Pure Metal compute shaders — no OpenCL, no CUDA
• 6.3 MH/s on M1 Pro — doubled from 3.2 via GPU optimizations
• Epoch-agnostic — auto-generates light cache for any epoch in ~3 seconds
• Auto DAG generation on GPU (~43 seconds)
• Stratum protocol — works with any KAWPOW pool
• Double-buffered command buffers — GPU never idles
• SIMD group operations — reduced threadgroup barriers
• ProgPow kernel recompilation — auto-adapts every 3 blocks

How It Works

KAWPOW (ProgPow) is a GPU-friendly Proof of Work algorithm designed to be ASIC-resistant:

1. Light cache — generated from epoch seed via Keccak-512 (~55MB)
2. DAG — 3.5GB+ lookup table generated on GPU from light cache
3. Mining — each thread computes Keccak-f800, accesses random DAG entries, runs epoch-specific random programs
4. Solution — when hash meets target difficulty, submit to pool/node

The Metal implementation ports all of this to Apple's GPU compute framework:

• KawpowShader.metal.template — GPU kernel (Keccak-f800, DAG access, ProgPow loop)
• main.swift — host code (DAG generation, mining loop, stratum client)

Pool

Join our pool: pool.rvnswap.xyz

• 1% fee
• PPLNS payouts
• Auto-payout at 100 RVN
• Live hashrate dashboard

Marketplace

Trade RVN assets: rvnswap.xyz

Building

swift build           # debug build
swift build -c release  # optimized release build

License

MIT