comparison of cgminer, poclbm, mac, and linux

At first this was about getting cgminer working on mac, with minimal effort...It turns out more than minimal effort is required. Anyway It's probably a nice read if your interested in bitcoin mining.

I was using a macbook pro from Mid 2010(4 gigs of ram, intel core 2 duo) An old linux box I built with 2 cores(amd) And the graphics card is a 6970 or 6950 I can't remember, it's the one with the shaders off, that you can unlock with a firmware update. And a BFL Single FPGA

I basically took my fedora core script and made some changes. I like cgminer, probably because the bitforce documentation said it was going to be the harder one to get working(Fuck the world, choose the wrench). And my single(FPGA) was acting funny and making noises. Essential the fan was to close or something, how that happend over the past 6 months I don't know, but I took it all apart, and then I reassembled the peices I thought it needed to work. I rescured the fan tight, but not so tight it was bumping as before, and I ran the fan wire in such a way it wouldn't fall into the fan. and then I elevated the feet with two notebooks, and it started running better than ever, hopefully by the end of writing this, it will be sitting on a wire shelf providing it with the same extra ventelation the two notebooks propping it up, now are. Now it normally runs on my linux box, but I decided I wanted to see if it ran on my Mac, so what I did was run the script below to install cgminer. If you notice I enable bitforce compatibility in the script.

So on my *nix box I was topping out at about 877
And on my mac box I'm topping out at...
However with my linux box, what i was able to do was to start using cgminer to do my graphics card which was topping out at 350 usually running at about 330 -340, and that's with --od-enable Clocks set at 920,1250, I saw the occasional problem if I bumped it to 925, 1250.

You have to have brew installed to do this
Make this script below then run it.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my $brew;

my @brew_installs = qw( 
    autoconf    automake    binutils    boost   bzip2   curl    curl    curl-ca-bundle      curl-ca-bundle      cyrus-sasl2     db48    flex    gdbm    gdbm    gettext            glib2    gnutls      gperf   help2man    icu     jansson     jpeg    kerberos5   libffi      libgcrypt   libgpg-error    libiconv    libidn      libpng      libtasn1    lzo2      m4    miniupnpc   ncurses     openssl     ossp-uuid   p5-locale-gettext   p5.12-locale-gettext    perl5   perl5.12    perl5.12    pkgconfig   pv      qemu    qrencode             readline   texinfo     xz      yasm    zlib )
;

&array_cracker();

           sub array_cracker(){
            foreach(@brew_installs){
               print $_; 
                  $brew = `brew install $_`;
                     print $brew;
                       }   
                       }   

Now I tried hard to script the next part but I had some problems so here are some manual commands you will have to type in:

cd ~
mkdir Build
cd Build
git clone https://github.com/ckolivas/cgminer.git
cd cgminer
./autogen.sh
./configure --enable-scrypt
sudo make install

I didn't have any problems after that, some people said before they did their commands they had to do this: eval `brew --config | grep HOMEBREW_PREFIX | sed 's/: /=/'` sudo bash -c 'echo '$HOMEBREW_PREFIX/share/aclocal' >> `aclocal --print-ac-dir`/dirlist' I imagine you would want to do that after all your installs from the perl brew script. So what's the verdict on speed. By using cgminer on my *nix box rather than poclbm i picked up about 10Mhs, it seems to consistently run at 362. Now the bitforce fpga, seemed to run about 800 on average, sitting in the same place with the side cover off, and as high as 1000(on the mac). However, moving it to it's new location, it seems to be running consistently in the high 800s. What does this mean....Well I can't leave it hooked up to my mac all the time as it is a laptop I use for work and have to go places with it as such. However, it's new location on a wire shelf(ie a shelf less likely to get hot), it's side panels taken off, those are permenant. And when i finally reconnect it to the linux box, I will be using cgminter to run both my fpga and gpu. And next weekends experiment will be trying the bitforce with raspberry pi, and also switching them away from deepbit.net, and back to my favorite pool fireducks horrible horrendous terrible tremendous pool. PS My mac command looked like this: cgminer --scan-serial /dev/cu.usbserial-00001024 --url deeptbit.net:8332 --user dusty@safenachos_fam --pass hammer --verbose Reason being the /dev/tty.usbetc Didn't work, and I'm sure there is a duhuh explanation for why that is, but just in case you didn't know.