The CGminer has become essentially just a disorganized and severely limited front-end for the FPGAs. In the present, we need an FPGA and a microcontroller to drive the hashing boards. Some CGminer source code was available, but it would just generate bad solutions and was practically useless. The manufacturer essentially prevented the use of AsicBoost because the code in the controller was intentionally wrong and it wasn’t documented. The best-known example of this is what we mentioned above: the AsicBoost incident with Antminer S9s in which the FPGAs were between the CPU and the hashboards, enabling AsicBoost functionality covertly. Over time, however, manufacturers shifted logic away from CGminer into the FPGAs on the control board. Originally, CGminer was utilized for this purpose. The role of the control board in this architecture is to continuously feed the chips with the right amount of new mining work. Typically, you have a control board with an FPGA and a CPU running some form of Linux on it, and then you have some hashing boards with mining chips that perform the actual Bitcoin mining work. The typical ASIC architecture consists of the following: ASICs are embedded devices, which means that they contain a special (rather than general) purpose computing system. Then, in late 2012, ASICs entered the market and quickly began to dominate SHA-256. Some people made their code open-source, while others did not. The general community was stuck using whatever happened to be available.įPGAs were the next evolution of mining hardware, but not much changed when it came to this CGminer component. Each GPU variant had special pieces of the GPU kernel being developed, and only a fraction of them were made open-source right away. With the introduction of GPU mining in late 2010, we began to see some of the open-source parts of the miner disappearing. Background on CGminerĬGminer started out as an open-source CPU miner that anybody could run. We’ll share an update about the latter in a future post, but for now we’ll focus on the alternative we’ve developed to replace CGminer, which we call BOSminer. That means addressing the other components of the stack: CGminer and stratum protocol. Our greater ambition when we began this project was to make the full stack open-source, standardized, efficient, and secure. However, Braiins OS is only one component of the full Bitcoin mining stack. With so few competitive HW manufacturers building ASIC machines for Bitcoin, providing a transparent alternative to the factory firmware increases decentralization in what is perhaps the most centralized part of the entire industry. The necessity of an open-source operating system for ASIC miners became apparent with the covert AsicBoost fiasco of 2017 (which we talked about here), but it was going to be important regardless of that incident. Just over a year ago, we launched our first open-source software project for Bitcoin mining: Braiins OS.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |