lolMiner-mnx
-- Announcement Thread --

Hi folks, this is the thread for announcing lolMiner-mnx for mining MinexCoin (MNX) based on the Equihash 96/5 algorithm (please do not confuse this with Zcash / BitcoinGolds Equihash 200/9). The current version of the miner is 0.34 beta (April 11, 2018) Download Links: [Lin 64] Click me (0.34, Linux) MD5 of package: 4b6a86481177fe4d09e4dcc71fe20828 [Win 64] Click me (0.34, Windows) MD5 of package: 27075cf216144bc4f47fc139b1fdb7e7 What is new (0.34)? Windows only: A new watchdog. This version of lolMiner comes with a watchdog script written in power shell. Basically it detects when the miner is stuck / has 0 sol/s and so on and can restart it if required. You can start it by clicking run_miner.cmd while the old run script is also on board. To configure the new watchdog you have to edit the watchdog-lolminer-v0.34.ps1 file. Especially you should give the name of your config file in the beginning. The watchdog is able to reboot the rig after a certain number of miner restarts. To enable this feature you have to set $global:allowReboot=$true in the header of the watchdog on line 18. For the reboot feature to be effective you should place the watchdog in your auto-start. Also you can allow it do do a screen shot on every crash by setting $global:allowScreenshot=$true on line 19. The parameter in line 18 controls the number of restarts before the watchdog closes itself or reboots the rig. In order to handle 0 sol/s cases the watchdog will require admin rights on your computer when it starts. This allows the watchdog to reset your GPU drivers before a new restart attempt. Because of this we made the watchdog open source so you can verify it does no harm to your system. Fixed a bug in stratum code: Before the miner got stuck when the first pool in list was not avaiable. This is fixed now. Also the miner no longer closes when the first pool reports an authorization of miner problem, but it now tests all failover pools in a row before exiting due to missing authorization Changed behavior of exit-on-zero Well did not find a better headline for this. The parameter exit-on-zero does not exist any more / has no effect. Instead when the miner detects that a GPU did not come back from a mining task properly it will print an error message and close. The same is true when a device does not finish a task for more then 30 seconds. New internal stratum behavior The stratum code now monitors for shares not tested (if they are below target) or not submitted. When there was no single share tested for a minute or no share submitted for 10 minutes, the miner will stop working and close itself, so the restart scripts or the Windows watchdog can restart it. New parameter: --continue-on-error This is the counterpart to the above two described changes. If this parameter is set the miner will continue working even when an error occurred. New parameter: --stats-digits
This will set the number of digits printed in statistics messages. E.g. if you set it to 0 the decimal delimiter and everything behind will be cut of. The default is 1.

Slight changes in work management
The change is something I wanted to test for 0.4. Basically it now tries to do the transfer from and to the cards asynchronously. Especially on AMD cards this helps reducing the difference in speed between work-batch HIGH and AUTO and lower values. Higher is still mining faster but the difference to lower values is now smaller

New parameter: --disable-double-buffer
This is the counterpart to the work management change. For some drivers (the open source Clover OpenCL drivers on Linux) this is required because not all drivers support the change.

New parameter: --disable-suprnova-for-fee
This parameter is meant to remove the suprnova pool from the list of fall-backs for the miners dev fee. Reason is that this pool is blocked in some countries and that the miner may get stuck on an ISP block of this pool.

lolMiner-mnx now got a license.txt file
Well that was required xD

lolMiner-mnx now displays proper AMD device names
Well its not yet perfect, but I think Radeon RX 470/480; RX 570/580 is better then Ellesmere - but I may be wrong ^^

FAQ:
What coins can I mine with the miner?
lolMiner-mnx is a software for stratum pool mining with the Equihash 96/5 algorithm (MARS). At the moment the only coin featuring this algorithm is MinexCoin (Symbol: MNX).

How to use the miner and what parameters it features?
The miner comes with a detailed description of all parameters in PDF form "lolMiner_readme.pdf". Since it is 4 pages long (0.32) I won't cite it all here.

Is this miner for CPU / GPU, and for which vendors?
It can be run on any device that can execute OpenCL 1.1 code. So CPU (Intel / AMD) as well as GPU (Intel / Nvidia / AMD). We have to admit that our testing systems are mainly Intel CPU with Nvidia graphics machines, so this is the best tested situation.

Is there any fee on the miner?
Yes, on version 0.3 the dev fee of the miner was lowered to 1.5% that its mining in background. The hash-rate displayed by the miner is netto hash, so you see what you get. The promise is to lower the fee once MNX increases much in price. Also if in any future time the support and development of the miner stops I promise to do a fee-free build and maybe also release the sources.

What are the system requirements for lolMiner-mnx?
You will need an 64 bit system running any Linux distribution or Windows 7 / 8 / 10.
Moreover the miner requires that an OpenCL driver for the devices you want to mine one is installed on your system.
Note that lolMiner utilizes the hardware very well and stresses it a lot.

What hash-rate can I expect from device x?
This massively depends on OS, driver, the hardware itself. Here are some numbers from our testing systems that we collected when testing the miner. If you run it successfully please report in this thread so we can extend the list.

NVidia Pascal Series (0.32)

Card	Performance	Comment
GTX 1050	5.5k sol/s	--optim OFF
GTX 1050 TI	6.5k sol/s	--optim OFF
GTX 1060	10.5k sol/s	--optim OFF
GTX 1060	11k sol/s	--optim STD, but card runs much hotter
GTX 1070	15.5k sol/s
GTX 1070 TI	17.5k sol/s
GTX 1080	19k sol/s
GTX 1080 TI	23k sol/s
GTX 1080 TI	30k sol/s	Massive OC & Water Cooled,
		Maximum reported until today

AMD Polaris & VEGA Series(0.34)

Card	Performance	Comment
RX 570	9k sol/s	8 GB, --set-work-batch HIGH
RX 580	9.2k sol/s	4 GB, --set-work-batch HIGH
RX 580	10k sol/s	8 GB, --set-work-batch HIGH
R9 Nano	11.5k sol/s	--set-work-batch 2G
R9 Fury X	12.3k sol/s
Vega 56	16.5k sol/s	--set-work-batch HIGH
Vega 64	18.5k sol/s	--set-work-batch HIGH
Radeon Pro Duo	23.8k sol/s

How to monitor fan setting and GPU temperatures in lolMiner-mnx?
Unfortunately that is not yet possible. We are searching for a way doing this vendor and OS independent. Hints how to do this are welcome!

Is there an API?
Not yet, but it is in development. (Hopefully in 0.4)

Are there known problems?
A known problem is that cards that are stressed too much will show 0 sol/s after some time, because they do not complete their OpenCL task and do not give back the handle to the mining software. Lower your OC or try to run the cards cooler when you experience this problems more often.

A second known problem is that the Linux version is much more stable then the Windows one although both versions share the same code. This is due to runtime problems that we still try to fix. If you have massive problems in Windows with the miner give the Linux version a try. A simple and easy to use alternative is HIVE OS, that ships with lolMiner from its 0.31 version. The OS is an easy to use OS for mining rigs on Linux base and offers you right now monitoring and automatic restart capabilities much beyond what most watchdogs can do. And it is also easy to configure and comes with recent graphic drivers. Give it a try.