bfgminer/NEWS

Version 1.4.0 - July 23, 2011

- Feature upgrade: Add keyboard input during runtime to allow modification of
and viewing of numerous settings such as adding/removing pools, changing
multipool management strategy, switching pools, changing intensiy, verbosity,
etc. with a simple keypress menu system.
- Free up resources/stale compilers.
- Kernels are safely flushed in a way that allows out of order execution to
work.
- Sometimes the cl compiler generates zero sized binaries and only a reboot
seems to fix it.
- Don't try to stop/cancel threads that don't exist.
- Only set option to show devices and exit if built with opencl support.
- Enable curses earlier and exit with message in main for messages to not be
lost in curses windows.
- Make it possible to enter server credentials with curses input if none are
specified on the command line.
- Abstract out a curses input function and separate input pool function to allow
for live adding of pools later.
- Remove the nil arguments check to allow starting without parameters.
- Disable/enable echo & cbreak modes.
- Add a thread that takes keyboard input and allow for quit, silent, debug,
verbose, normal, rpc protocol debugging and clear screen options.
- Add pool option to input and display current pool status, pending code to
allow live changes.
- Add a bool for explicit enabling/disabling of pools.
- Make input pool capable of bringing up pools while running.
- Do one last check of the work before submitting it.
- Implement the ability to live add, enable, disable, and switch to pools.
- Only internally test for block changes when the work matches the current pool
to prevent interleaved block change timing on multipools.
- Display current pool management strategy to enable changing it on the fly.
- The longpoll blanking of the current_block data may not be happening before
the work is converted and appears to be a detected block change.     Blank the
current block be
- Make --no-longpoll work again.
- Abstract out active pools count.
- Allow the pool strategy to be modified on the fly.
- Display pool information on the fly as well.
- Add a menu and separate out display options.
- Clean up the messy way the staging thread communicates with the longpoll
thread to determine who found the block first.
- Make the input windows update immediately instead of needing a refresh.
- Allow log interval to be set in the menu.
- Allow scan settings to be modified at runtime.
- Abstract out the longpoll start and explicitly restart it on pool change.
- Make it possible to enable/disable longpoll.
- Set priority correctly on multipools.     Display priority and alive/dead
information in display_pools.
- Implement pool removal.
- Limit rolltime work generation to 10 iterations only.
- Decrease testing log to info level.
- Extra refresh not required.
- With huge variation in GPU performance, allow intensity to go from -10 to +10.
- Tell getwork how much of a work item we're likely to complete for future
splitting up of work.
- Remove the mandatory work requirement at startup by testing for invalid work
being passed which allows for work to be queued immediately.     This also
removes the requirem
- Make sure intensity is carried over to thread count and is at least the
minimum necessary to work.
- Unlocking error on retry. Locking unnecessary anyway so remove it.
- Clear log window from consistent place. No need for locking since logging is
disabled during input.
- Cannot print the status of threads that don't exist so just queue enough work
for the number of mining threads to prevent crash with -Q N.
- Update phatk kernel to one with new parameters for slightly less overhead
again.     Make the queue kernel parameters call a function pointer to select
phatk or poclbm.
- Make it possible to select the choice of kernel on the command line.
- Simplify the output part of the kernel. There's no demonstrable advantage from
more complexity.
- Merge pull request #18 from ycros/cgminer
- No need to make leaveok changes win32 only.
- Build support in for all SSE if possible and only set the default according to
machine capabilities.
- Win32 threading and longpoll keepalive fixes.
- Win32: Fix for mangled output on the terminal on exit.


Version 1.3.1 - July 20, 2011

- Feature upgrade; Multiple strategies for failover. Choose from default which
now falls back to a priority order from 1st to last, round robin which only
changes pools when one is idle, rotate which changes pools at user-defined
intervals, and load-balance which spreads the work evenly amongst all pools.
- Implement pool rotation strategy.
- Implement load balancing algorithm by rotating requests to each pool.
- Timeout on failed discarding of staged requests.
- Implement proper flagging of idle pools, test them with the watchdog thread,
and failover correctly.
- Move pool active test to own function.
- Allow multiple strategies to be set for multipool management.
- Track pool number.
- Don't waste the work items queued on testing the pools at startup.
- Reinstate the mining thread watchdog restart.
- Add a getpoll bool into the thread information and don't restart threads stuck
waiting on work.
- Rename the idlenet bool for the pool for later use.
- Allow the user/pass userpass urls to be input in any order.
- When json rpc errors occur they occur in spits and starts, so trying to limit
them with the comms error bool doesn't stop a flood of them appearing.
- Reset the queued count to allow more work to be queued for the new pool on
pool switch.

Version 1.3.0 - July 19, 2011

- Massive infrastructure update to support pool failover.
- Accept multiple parameters for url, user and pass and set up structures of
pool data accordingly.
- Probe each pool for what it supports.
- Implement per pool feature support according to rolltime support as
advertised by server.
- Do switching automatically based on a 300 second timeout of locally generated
work or 60 seconds of no response from a server that doesn't support rolltime.
- Implement longpoll server switching.
- Keep per-pool data and display accordingly.
- Make sure cgminer knows how long the pool has actually been out for before
deeming it a prolonged outage.
- Fix bug with ever increasing staged work in 1.2.8 that eventually caused
infinite rejects.
- Make warning about empty http requests not show by default since many
servers do this regularly.


Version 1.2.8 - July 18, 2011

- More OSX build fixes.
- Add an sse4 algorithm to CPU mining.
- Fix CPU mining with other algorithms not working.
- Rename the poclbm file to ensure a new binary is built since.
- We now are guaranteed to have one fresh work item after a block change and we
should only discard staged requests.
- Don't waste the work we retrieve from a longpoll.
- Provide a control lock around global bools to avoid racing on them.
- Iterating over 1026 nonces when confirming data from the GPU is old code
and unnecessary and can lead to repeats/stales.
- The poclbm kernel needs to be updated to work with the change to 4k sized
output buffers.
- longpoll seems to work either way with post or get but some servers prefer
get so change to httpget.


Version 1.2.7 - July 16, 2011

- Show last 8 characters of share submitted in log.
- Display URL connected to and user logged in as in status.
- Display current block and when it was started in the status line.
- Only pthread_join the mining threads if they exist as determined by
pthread_cancel and don't fail on pthread_cancel.
- Create a unique work queue for all getworks instead of binding it to thread 0
to avoid any conflict over thread 0's queue.
- Clean up the code to make it clear it's watchdog thread being messaged to
restart the threads.
- Check the current block description hasn't been blanked pending the real
new current block data.
- Re-enable signal handlers once the signal has been received to make it
possible to kill cgminer if it fails to shut down.
- Disable restarting of CPU mining threads pending further investigation.
- Update longpoll messages.
- Add new block data to status line.
- Fix opencl tests for osx.
- Only do local generation of work if the work item is not stale itself.
- Check for stale work within the mining threads and grab new work if
positive.
- Test for idle network conditions and prevent threads from being restarted
by the watchdog thread under those circumstances.
- Make sure that local work generation does not continue indefinitely by
stopping it after 10 minutes.
- Tweak the kernel to have a shorter path using a 4k buffer and a mask on the
nonce value instead of a compare and loop for a shorter code path.
- Allow queue of zero and make that default again now that we can track how
work is being queued versus staged. This can decrease reject rates.
- Queue precisely the number of mining threads as longpoll_staged after a
new block to not generate local work.


Version 1.2.6 - July 15, 2011

- Put a current system status line beneath the total work status line
- Fix a counting error that would prevent cgminer from correctly detecting
situations where getwork was failing - this would cause stalls sometimes
unrecoverably.
- Limit the maximum number of requests that can be put into the queue which
otherwise could get arbitrarily long during a network outage.
- Only count getworks that are real queue requests.


Version 1.2.5 - July 15, 2011

- Conflicting -n options corrected
- Setting an intensity with -I disables dynamic intensity setting
- Removed option to manually disable dynamic intensity
- Improve display output
- Implement signal handler and attempt to clean up properly on exit
- Only restart threads that are not stuck waiting on mandatory getworks
- Compatibility changes courtesy of Ycros to build on mingw32 and osx
- Explicitly grab first work item to prevent false positive hardware errors
due to working on uninitialised work structs
- Add option for non curses --text-only output
- Ensure we connect at least once successfully before continuing to retry to
connect in case url/login parameters were wrong
- Print an executive summary when cgminer is terminated
- Make sure to refresh the status window

Versions -> 1.2.4

- Con Kolivas - July 2011. New maintainership of code under cgminer name.
- Massive rewrite to incorporate GPU mining.
- Incorporate original oclminer c code.
- Rewrite gpu mining code to efficient work loops.
- Implement per-card detection and settings.
- Implement vector code.
- Implement bfi int patching.
- Import poclbm and phatk ocl kernels and use according to hardware type.
- Implement customised optimised versions of opencl kernels.
- Implement binary kernel generation and loading.
- Implement preemptive asynchronous threaded work gathering and pushing.
- Implement variable length extra work queues.
- Optimise workloads to be efficient miners instead of getting lots of extra
  work.
- Implement total hash throughput counters, per-card accepted, rejected and
  hw error count.
- Staging and watchdog threads to prevent fallover.
- Stale and reject share guarding.
- Autodetection of new blocks without longpoll.
- Dynamic setting of intensity to maintain desktop interactivity.
- Curses interface with generous statistics and information.
- Local generation of work (xroll ntime) when detecting poor network
connectivity.

Version 1.0.2

- Linux x86_64 optimisations - Con Kolivas
- Optimise for x86_64 by default by using sse2_64 algo
- Detects CPUs and sets number of threads accordingly
- Uses CPU affinity for each thread where appropriate
- Sets scheduling policy to lowest possible
- Minor performance tweaks

Version 1.0.1 - May 14, 2011

- OSX support

Version 1.0 - May 9, 2011

- jansson 2.0 compatibility
- correct off-by-one in date (month) display output
- fix platform detection
- improve yasm configure bits
- support full URL, in X-Long-Polling header

Version 0.8.1 - March 22, 2011

- Make --user, --pass actually work

- Add User-Agent HTTP header to requests, so that server operators may
  more easily identify the miner client.

- Fix minor bug in example JSON config file

Version 0.8 - March 21, 2011

- Support long polling: http://deepbit.net/longpolling.php

- Adjust max workload based on scantime (default 5 seconds,
  or 60 seconds for longpoll)

- Standardize program output, and support syslog on Unix platforms

- Suport --user/--pass options (and "user" and "pass" in config file),
  as an alternative to the current --userpass

Version 0.7.2 - March 14, 2011

- Add port of ufasoft's sse2 assembly implementation (Linux only)
  This is a substantial speed improvement on Intel CPUs.

- Move all JSON-RPC I/O to separate thread.  This reduces the
  number of HTTP connections from one-per-thread to one, reducing resource
  usage on upstream bitcoind / pool server.

Version 0.7.1 - March 2, 2011

- Add support for JSON-format configuration file.  See example
  file example-cfg.json.  Any long argument on the command line
  may be stored in the config file.
- Timestamp each solution found
- Improve sha256_4way performance.  NOTE: This optimization makes
  the 'hash' debug-print output for sha256_way incorrect.
- Use __builtin_expect() intrinsic as compiler micro-optimization
- Build on Intel compiler
- HTTP library now follows HTTP redirects

Version 0.7 - February 12, 2011

- Re-use CURL object, thereby reuseing DNS cache and HTTP connections
- Use bswap_32, if compiler intrinsic is not available
- Disable full target validation (as opposed to simply H==0) for now

Version 0.6.1 - February 4, 2011

- Fully validate "hash < target", rather than simply stopping our scan
  if the high 32 bits are 00000000.
- Add --retry-pause, to set length of pause time between failure retries
- Display proof-of-work hash and target, if -D (debug mode) enabled
- Fix max-nonce auto-adjustment to actually work.  This means if your
  scan takes longer than 5 seconds (--scantime), the miner will slowly
  reduce the number of hashes you work on, before fetching a new work unit.

Version 0.6 - January 29, 2011

- Fetch new work unit, if scanhash takes longer than 5 seconds (--scantime)
- BeeCee1's sha256 4way optimizations
- lfm's byte swap optimization (improves via, cryptopp)
- Fix non-working short options -q, -r

Version 0.5 - December 28, 2010

- Exit program, when all threads have exited
- Improve JSON-RPC failure diagnostics and resilience
- Add --quiet option, to disable hashmeter output.

Version 0.3.3 - December 27, 2010

- Critical fix for sha256_cryptopp 'cryptopp_asm' algo

Version 0.3.2 - December 23, 2010

- Critical fix for sha256_via

Version 0.3.1 - December 19, 2010

- Critical fix for sha256_via
- Retry JSON-RPC failures (see --retry, under "minerd --help" output)

Version 0.3 - December 18, 2010

- Add crypto++ 32bit assembly implementation
- show version upon 'minerd --help'
- work around gcc 4.5.x bug that killed 4way performance

Version 0.2.2 - December 6, 2010

- VIA padlock implementation works now
- Minor build and runtime fixes

Version 0.2.1 - November 29, 2010

- avoid buffer overflow when submitting solutions
- add Crypto++ sha256 implementation (C only, ASM elided for now)
- minor internal optimizations and cleanups

Version 0.2 - November 27, 2010

- Add script for building a Windows installer
- improve hash performance (hashmeter) statistics
- add tcatm 4way sha256 implementation
- Add experimental VIA Padlock sha256 implementation

Version 0.1.2 - November 26, 2010

- many small cleanups and micro-optimizations
- build win32 exe using mingw
- RPC URL, username/password become command line arguments
- remove unused OpenSSL dependency

Version 0.1.1 - November 24, 2010

- Do not build sha256_generic module separately from cpuminer.

Version 0.1 - November 24, 2010

- Initial release.