[Pkg-bitcoin-devel] BFGminer and OpenCL/GPU/CPU mining

[Raphaël Halimi]

Hi,

I write to this mailing list as a last resort because after a whole day
of trial and error, I couldn't make BFGminer work.

(please save me the "CPU/GPU mining is dead" speech, I know that, but I
still want to make it work for several reasons : first, for testing
purposes, and plain old fun; second, because if one day I get serious
about mining, I don't want to buy any specialized hardware before I have
the software part working properly; and third, if I'm not mistaken,
unlike bitcoin, litecoin mining with GPU and a lot of system RAM still
make sense)

So, I have an up-to-date Debian Sid installed on a fairly old PC : AMD
Phenom II X4 965 BE, 16 GB RAM, integrated AMD 4290 GPU (but it's
currently disabled in the BIOS), and discrete Radeon 6570 GPU. The AMD
non-free driver is NOT installed (it's currently not installable in Sid).

So, theoretically, I should be able to mine through OpenCL either with
the GPU (with mesa-opencl-icd) or with the CPU (with amd-opencl-icd);
or, directly with the CPU (by recompiling BFGmimner to enable CPU mining).

Unfortunately, despite my numerous attempts, I couldn't make BFGminer
detect any part of my hardware; "bfgminer -n" never outputs anything
else that "0 GPU devices max detected".

Even with "--debug", the result is the same (I would expect some more
messages, like "trying USB: nothing found, trying opencl: nothing
found", etc etc; but no, the output is exactly the same as without
"--debug").

I tried several combinations of mesa-opencl-icd/amd-opencl-icd and
ocl-icd-libopencl1/amd-libopencl1, with or without "-S opencl:auuto";
nothing worked. Despite the fact that clinfo properly reports my
hardware (the Phenom CPU with amd-opencl-icd, and the Turks GPU with
mesa-opencl-icd), BFGminer still won't report anything else than "0 GPU
devices max detected".

The README states that to mine with the free drivers, the binary needs
llvm, clang, libclc and mesa (not clarifying if they're needed at
build-time or run-time); I tried to recompile the package with these, to
no avail (it seems they're not even detected by the configure script).

After all this I tried to resort to CPU mining, again by recompiling the
package to enable it (configure option in debian/rules and yasm
build-dependency in debian/control), and again, to no avail (with or
without "--debug" or "-S cpu:auto", still "0 GPU devices max detected").

The fact that there's no additional output from bfgminer with "--debug"
makes me think it's somewhat broken, but since I'm no C coder, I can't
look at the source code to be sure.

I don't understand either why the Debian package description advertises
GPU mining, whereas llvm/clang/libclc/mesa are not listed in
build-depends (or in recommends, if needed at run-time) while the README
states they're needed for free GPU mining.

I admit I'm at a lost here, I don't know what to do next. Any help would
be appreciated.

Regards,

-- 
Raphaël Halimi

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