ethminer

Ethereum miner with OpenCL, CUDA and stratum support

Ethminer is an Ethash GPU mining worker: with ethminer you can mine every coin which relies on an Ethash Proof of Work thus including Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Metaverse, Musicoin, Ellaism, Pirl, Expanse and others. 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
  • Examples connecting some pools
• 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.

Builds	Release	Date
Last
Stable

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

Examples connecting some pools

Check our samples to see how to connect to different pools.

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. Make sure git submodules are up to date

   git submodule update --init --recursive

2. Create a build directory.

   mkdir build; cd build

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

   cmake ..

   Note: In Windows, it is possible to have issues with VS 2017 compilers, in that case, use VS 2017 installer to get VS 2015 compilers and use:

   cmake .. -G "Visual Studio 15 2017 Win64" -Tv140,host=x64

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

   cmake --build .

   Note: In Windows, it is possible to have compiler issues if you don't specify build config. In that case use:

   cmake --build . --config Release

5. (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, ON by default.
• -DAPICORE=ON - enable API Server, ON by default.
• -DETHDBUS=ON - enable D-Bus support, OFF 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.

License

Licensed under the GNU General Public License, Version 3.

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?

   Not really, your VRAM must be above the DAG size (Currently about 2.15 GB.) to get best performance. Without it severe hash loss will occur.

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.

8. Can I CPU Mine?

   No, use geth, the go program made for ethereum by ethereum.

9. CUDA GPU order changes sometimes. What can I do?

   There is an environment var CUDA_DEVICE_ORDER which tells the Nvidia CUDA driver how to enumerates the graphic cards. Following values are valid:

   • FASTEST_FIRST (Default) - causes CUDA to guess which device is fastest using a simple heuristic.
   • PCI_BUS_ID - orders devices by PCI bus ID in ascending order.

   To prevent some unwanted changes in the order of your CUDA devices you might set the environment to PCI_BUS_ID. This can be done:

   • Linux:

     • Adapt /etc/environment file and add a line CUDA_DEVICE_ORDER=PCI_BUS_ID
     • Adapt your start script launching ethminer and add a line export CUDA_DEVICE_ORDER=PCI_BUS_ID

   • Windows:

     • Adapt your environment using the control panel (just search setting environment windows control panel using your favorite search engine)
     • Adapt your start (.bat) file launching ethminer and add a line setx CUDA_DEVICE_ORDER=PCI_BUS_ID or set CUDA_DEVICE_ORDER=PCI_BUS_ID
     • For more details about setx and set see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/setx