Quote from: efudd on October 14, 2018, 12:43:31 PM

Quote from: efudd on October 13, 2018, 05:46:38 AM

Folk,

I wanted to post a quick update on the per-hashboard-frequency control modification (and associated functionality). The short version: no good progress as of 1:30AM Eastern on 10/13/2018.

The long version (which is a collection of random thoughts and probably won't make sense to many):

* Hardware was loaned to me (a Z9, thank you...) so I could continue some development work. This arrived on Wednesday.
* Since then I've been working on various methods to modify the firmware to extend functionality.
* The methods I normally would use for this are running into issues with bitmain's release. The basic gist is, it looks like they built things with gcc, and there is an issue I don't yet understand that prevents me from using my preferred method to extend functionality. If it were built with clang, this would be different...
* I've been at this more or less non-stop the last 36+ waking hours... and I'm going to take a break now....
* With some luck I'll have another good idea(s) on other ways to attack this... I've been through countless variations so far.
* The problem is not with knowing what to modify inside the firmware, it's with actually modifying things at run-time in system memory.
* The most challenging solution is: trace the hardware (via software and/or external devices), reverse engineer the hardware communications and extend public sources to support this BM1704 and PICF16704... the -DASH variant firmware has an older incarnation of the PIC control code... yet the comms endpoints are not correct.
* ... lots of other thoughts, but gonna pause for now.

What's next?

* Hopefully I get another good idea at attacking a highly esoteric problem...
* ... I have lots of improvement ideas for the firmware; things that would apply to all Z series and even future miners... but I must break through the current roadblock to get to any of those things.

More soon(ish).

Thank you,

Jason

Small update -- I got through the "wall" I was banging my head against when I wrote this update. I'm now "climbing the hill", which means slow but steady progress. I have a couple of infrastructure pieces to complete that are the more challenging components, and then I should be able to make some quick progress towards the per-hashboard frequency management.

More soon.

-j

Great work!