bfgminer/NEWS

Version 2.2.0 - January 29, 2012

NOTE: GPU Device order will change with this release with ATI GPUs as cgminer
now can enumerate them according to their Bus ID which means the values should
now correlate with their physical position on the motherboard.

- Default to poclbm kernel on Tahiti (7970) since phatk does not work, even
though performance is sub-standard so that at least it will mine successfully by
defau
- Retain cl program after every possible place we might build the program.
- Update ADL SDK URL.
- Fix potential overflow.
- Map GPU devices to virtual devices in their true physical order based on
BusNumber.
- Change the warning that comes with failure to init cl on a device to be more
generic and accurate.
- Advertise longpoll support in X-Mining-Extensions
- Detect dual GPU cards by iterating through all GPUs, finding ones without
fanspeed and matching twins with fanspeed one bus ID apart.
- Do not attempt to build the program that becomes the kernel twice. This could
have been leading to failures on initialising cl.
- Some opencl compilers have issues with no spaces after -D in the compiler
options.
- Allow intensity up to 14.
- Use calloced stack memory for CompilerOptions to ensure sprintf writes to the
beginning of the char.
- Whitelist 79x0 cards to prefer no vectors as they perform better without.
- Adjust fan speed gently while in the optimal range when temperature is
drifting to minimise overshoot in either direction.
- Detect dual GPU cards via the indirect information of - 1st card has a fan
controller. 2nd card does not have a fan controller, cards share the same device
name
- Instead of using the BFI_INT patching hack on any device reporting
cl_amd_media_ops, create a whitelist of devices that need it. This should enable
GCN architec
- Fixed API compiling issue on OS X
- Add more explanation of JSON format and the 'save' command
- Return an error if using ADL API commands when it's not available
- Read off lpThermalControllerInfo from each ADL device.
- Add ADL_Overdrive5_ThermalDevices_Enum interface.
- Add API commands: config, switchpool, gpu settings, save
- Implement socks4 proxy support.
- Fix send() for JSON strings
- Introduce a --net-delay option which guarantees at least 250ms between any
networking requests to not overload slow routers.
- Generalise locking init code.
- Allow invalid values to be in the configuration file, just skipping over them
provided the rest of the file is valid JSON. This will allow older configurat
- Allow CPU mining explicitly enable only if other mining support is built in.
- BitForce FPGA support
- Configure out building and support of all CPU mining code unless
--enable-cpumining is enabled.
- Allow parsed values to be zero which will allow 0 values in the config file to
work.
- Advertise that we can make our own midstate, so the pool can skip generating
it for us
- Refactor the CPU scanhash_* functions to use a common API. Fixes bugs.
- Don't consider a pool lagging if a request has only just been filed. This
should decrease the false positives for "pool not providing work fast enough".
- Invalidating work after longpoll made hash_pop return no work giving a false
positive for dead pool. Rework hash_pop to retry while finds no staged work u
- Remove TCP_NODELAY from curl options as many small packets may be contributing
to network overload, when --net-delay is enabled.
- Refactor miner_thread to be common code for any kind of device
- Simplify submit_nonce loop and avoid potentially missing FOUND - 1 entry.
Reported by Luke-Jr.
- Micro-optimisation in sha256_sse2 code courtesy of Guido Ascioti
guido.ascioti@gmail.com
- Refactor to abstract device-specific code


Version 2.1.2 - January 6, 2012

- If api-description is specified, save it when writing the config file
- Adjust utility width to be constant maximum as well.
- Add percent signs to reject ratio outputs
- Should the donation pool fail, don't make the fallover pool behave as though
the primary pool is lagging.
- Use an alternative pool should the donation getwork fail.


Version 2.1.1 - January 1, 2012

- Include API examples in distribution tarball.
- Don't attempt to pthread_join when cancelling threads as they're already
detached and doing so can lead to a segfault.
- Give more generic message if slow pool at startup is the donation pool.
- Continue to attempt restarting GPU threads if they're flagged dead at 1 min.
intervals.
- Don't attempt to restart sick flagged GPUs while they're still registering
activity.
- Make curl use fresh connections whenever there is any communication issue
in case there are dead persistent connections preventing further comms from
working.
- Display pool in summary if only 1 pool.
- Adjust column width of A/R/HW to be the maximum of any device and align them.


Version 2.1.0 - December 27, 2011

- Major infrastructure upgrade with RPC interface for controlling via sockets
encoded with/without JSON courtesy of Andrew Smith. Added documentation for
use of the API and sample code to use with it.
- Updated linux-usb-cgminer document.
- Rewrite of longpoll mechanism to choose the current pool wherever possible to
use for the longpoll, or any pool that supports longpoll if the current one
does not.
- Display information about longpoll when the chosen server has changed.
- Fix the bug where longpoll generated work may have been sent back to the
wrong pool, causing rejects.
- Fix a few race conditions on closing cgminer which caused some of the crashes
on exit.
- Only adjust gpu engine speed in autotune mode if the gpu is currently at the
performance level of that being adjusted.
- Various fixes for parsing/writing of configuration files.
- Do not add blank lines for threads of unused CPUs.
- Show which pool is unresponsive on startup.
- Only show GPU management menu item if GPUs are in use.
- Align most device columns in the curses display.


Version 2.0.8 - November 11, 2011

- Make longpoll do a mandatory flushing of all work even if the block hasn't
changed, thus supporting longpoll initiated work change of any sort and merged
mining.
- Byteswap computed hash in hashtest so it can be correctly checked. This fixes
the very rare possibility that a block solve on solo mining was missed.
- Add x86_64 w64 mingw32 target
- Allow a fixed speed difference between memory and GPU clock speed with
--gpu-memdiff that will change memory speed when GPU speed is changed in
autotune mode.
- Don't load the default config if a config file is specified on the command
line.
- Don't build VIA on apple since -a auto bombs instead of gracefully ignoring
VIA failing.
- Build fix for dlopen/dlclose errors in glibc.


Version 2.0.7 - October 17, 2011

- Support work without midstate or hash1, which are deprecated in bitcoind 0.5+
- Go to kernel build should we fail to clCreateProgramWithBinary instead of
failing on that device. This should fix the windows problems with devices not
initialising.
- Support new configuration file format courtesy of Chris Savery which can write
the config file from the menu and will load it on startup.
- Write unix configuration to .cgminer/cgminer.conf by default and prompt to
overwrite if given a filename from the menu that exists.


Version 2.0.6 - October 9, 2011

- Must initialise the donorpool mutex or it fails on windows.
- Don't make donation work interfere with block change detection allowing
donation to work regardless of the block chain we're mining on.
- Expire shares as stale with a separate timeout from the scantime, defaulting
to 120 seconds.
- Retry pools after a delay of 15 seconds if none can be contacted on startup
unless a key is pressed.
- Don't try to build adl features without having adl.
- Properly check shares against target difficulty - This will no longer show
shares when solo mining at all unless they're considered to be a block solve.
- Add altivec 4 way (cpu mining) support courtesy of Gilles Risch.
- Try to use SSL if the server supports it.
- Display the total solved blocks on exit (LOL if you're lucky).
- Use ADL activity report to tell us if a sick GPU is still busy suggesting it
is hard hung and do not attempt to restart it.


Version 2.0.5 - September 27, 2011

- Intensity can now be set to dynamic or static values per-device.
- New donation feature --donation sends a proportion of shares to author's
account of choice, but is disabled by default!
- The hash being displayed and block detection has been fixed.
- Devices not being mined on will not attempt to be ADL managed.
- Intensity is now displayed per GPU device.
- Make longpoll attempt to restart as often as opt_retries specifies.
- We weren't rolling work as often as we could.
- Correct some memory management issues.
- Build fixes.
- Don't mess with GPUs if we don't have them.


Version 2.0.4 - September 23, 2011

- Confused Longpoll messages should be finally fixed with cgminer knowing for
sure who found the new block and possibly avoiding a rare crash.
- Display now shows the actual hash and will say BLOCK! if a block is deemed
solved.
- Extra spaces, which would double space lines on small terminals, have been
removed.
- Fan speed change is now damped if it is already heading in the correct
direction to minimise overshoot.
- Building without opencl libraries is fixed.
- GPUs are autoselected if there is only one when in the GPU management menu.
- GPU menu is refreshed instead of returning to status after a GPU change.


Version 2.0.3 - September 17, 2011

- Various modes of failure to set fanspeeds and adl values have been addressed
and auto-fan should work now on most hardware, and possibly other values
which previously would not have worked.
- Fixed a crash that can occur on switching pools due to longpoll thread races.
- Use ATISTREAMSDKROOT if available at build time.
- Fanspeed management is returned to the driver default on exit instead of
whatever it was when cgminer was started.
- Logging of events deemed WARNING or ERR now will display even during
periods where menu input is being awaited on.


Version 2.0.2 - September 11, 2011

- Exit cleanly if we abort before various threads are set up or if they no
longer exist.
- Fix a rare crash in HASH_DEL due to using different mutexes to protect the
data.
- Flag devices that have never started and don't allow enabling of devices
without restarting them.
- Only force the adapter speed to high if we've flagged this device as being
managed.
- Flag any devices with autofan or autogpu as being managed.
- Use a re-entrant value to store what fanspeed we're trying to set in case the
card doesn't support small changes.     Force it to a multiple of 10% if it
fails on trying to speed up the fan.
- Do not bother resetting values to old ones if changes to GPU parameters report
failure, instead returning a failure code only if the return value from get()
differs.
- Remove redundant check.
- Only display supported values from fanspeed on change settings.
- Missing bracket from output.
- Display fan percentage on devices that only support reporting percent and not
RPM.
- Properly substitute DLOPEN flags to build with ADL support when -ldl is needed
and not when opencl is not found.


Version 2.0.1 - September 9, 2011

- Fix building on 32bit glibc with dlopen with -lpthread and -ldl
- ByteReverse is not used and the bswap opcode breaks big endian builds. Remove
it.
- Ignore whether the display is active or not since only display enabled devices
work this way, and we skip over repeat entries anwyay.
- Only reset values on exiting if we've ever modified them.
- Flag adl as active if any card is successfully activated.
- Add a thermal cutoff option as well and set it to 95 degrees by default.
- Change the fan speed by only 5% if it's over the target temperature but less
than the hysteresis value to minimise overshoot down in temperature.
- Add a --no-adl option to disable ADL monitoring and GPU settings.
- Only show longpoll received delayed message at verbose level.
- Allow temperatures greater than 100 degrees.
- We should be passing a float for the remainder of the vddc values.
- Implement accepting a range of engine speeds as well to allow a lower limit to
be specified on the command line.
- Allow per-device fan ranges to be set and use them in auto-fan mode.
- Display which GPU has overheated in warning message.
- Allow temperature targets to be set on a per-card basis on the command line.
- Display fan range in autofan status.
- Setting the hysteresis is unlikely to be useful on the fly and doesn't belong
in the per-gpu submenu.
- With many cards, the GPU summaries can be quite long so use a terse output
line when showing them all.
- Use a terser device status line to show fan RPM as well when available.
- Define max gpudevices in one macro.
- Allow adapterid 0 cards to enumerate as a device as they will be non-AMD
cards, and enable ADL on any AMD card.
- Do away with the increasingly confusing and irrelevant total queued and
efficiency measures per device.
- Only display values in the log if they're supported and standardise device log
line printing.


Version 2.0.0 - September 6, 2011

Major feature upgrade - GPU monitoring, (over)clocking and fan control for ATI
GPUs.

New command line switches:
--auto-fan-     Automatically adjust all GPU fan speeds to maintain a target
temperature
--auto-gpu-     Automatically adjust all GPU engine clock speeds to maintain
a target temperature
--gpu-engine <arg>  Set the GPU engine (over)clock in Mhz - one value for all or
separate by commas for per card.
--gpu-fan <arg>     Set the GPU fan percentage - one value for all or separate
by commas for per card.
--gpu-memclock <arg> Set the GPU memory (over)clock in Mhz - one value for all
or separate by commas for per card.
--gpu-powertune <arg> Set the GPU powertune percentage - one value for all or
separate by commas for per card.
--gpu-vddc <arg>    Set the GPU voltage in Volts - one value for all or separate
by commas for per card.
--temp-hysteresis <arg> Set how much the temperature can fluctuate outside
limits when automanaging speeds (default: 3)
--temp-overheat <arg> Set the overheat temperature when automatically managing
fan and GPU speeds (default: 85)
--temp-target <arg> Set the target temperature when automatically managing fan
and GPU speeds (default: 75)

- Implement ATI ADL support for GPU parameter monitoring now and setting later
(temp, fan, clocks etc.).
- Check for the presence of the ADL header files in ADL_SDK.
- Import adl_functions.h from amd overdrive ctrl.
- Implement a setup function that tries to detect GPUs that support the ADL and
link in the parameters into the gpus struct.
- Put a summary of monitoring information from the GPU menu.
- Implement changing memory speed and voltage on the fly.
- Implement fan speed setting.
- Minor corrections to set fan speed by percentage.
- Make sure to read off the value in RPM only.
- Implement auto fanspeed adjustment to maintain a target temperature and
fanspeed below 85%, with an overheat check that will speed the fan up to 100%.
- Add an --auto-fan command line option to allow all GPUs to have autofan
enabled from startup.
- Add a gpu autotune option which adjusts GPU speed to maintain a target
temperature within the bounds of the default GPU speed and any overclocking set.
- Avoid a dereference if the longpoll thread doesn't exist.
- Clean up by setting performance profiles and fan settings to startup levels on
exit.
- Add a small amount of hysteresis before lowering clock speed.
- Allow target, overheat and hysteresis temperatures to be set from command
line.
- Combine all stats collating into one function to avoid repeating function
calls on each variable.
- Add gpu statistics to debugging output via the watchdog thread.
- Implement menus to change temperature limits.
- Implement setting the GPU engine clock speed of all devices or each device as
a comma separated value.
- Implement setting the GPU memory clock speed of all devices or each device as
a comma separated value.
- Implement setting the GPU voltage of all devices or each device as a comma
separated value.
- Implement setting the GPU fan speed of all devices or each device as a comma
separated value.
- Add support for monitoring powertune setting.
- Implement changing of powertune value from the GPU change settings menu.
- Get the value of powertune in get_stats.
- Implement setting the GPU powertune value of all devices or each device as a
comma separated value.
- Remove the safety checks in speed setting since confirmation is done first in
the menu, then show the new current values after a short pause.
- Force the speed to high on startup and restore it to whatever the setting was
on exit.
- Add temperature to standard output where possible and use more compact output.
- Move and print at the same time in curses to avoid random trampling display
errors.
- Update the status window only from the watchdog thread, do not rewrite the top
status messages and only refresh once all the status window is complete,
clearing the window each time to avoid corruption.
- Set a safe starting fan speed if we're automanaging the speeds.
- Provide locking around all adl calls to prevent races.
- Lower profile settings cannot be higher than higher profile ones so link any
drops in settings.
- Add new needed text files to distribution.
- Queue requests ignoring the number of staged clones since they get discarded
very easily leading to false positives for pool not providing work fast enough.
- Include libgen.h in opt.c to fix win32 compilation warnings.
- Fix compilation warning on win32.
- Add the directory name from the arguments cgminer was called from as well to
allow it running from a relative pathname.
- Add a --disable-adl option to configure and only enable it if opencl support
exists.
- Retry before returning a failure to get upstream work as a failure to avoid
false positives for pool dead.
- Retry also if the decoding of work fails.
- Use the presence of X-Roll-Ntime in the header as a bool for exists unless N
is found in the response.


Version 1.6.2 - September 2, 2011

- Add --failover-only option to not leak work to backup pools when the primary
pool is lagging.
- Change recommendation to intensity 9 for dedicated miners.
- Fix the bouncing short term value by allowing it to change dynamically when
the latest value is very different from the rolling value, but damp the change
when it gets close.
- Use the curses_lock to protect the curses_active variable and test it under
lock.
- Go back to requesting work 2/3 of the way through the current scantime with
CPU mining as reports of mining threads running out of work have occurred with
only 5 seconds to retrieve work.
- Add start and stop time scheduling for regular time of day running or once off
start/stop options.
- Print summary on quit modes.
- Put some sanity checks on the times that can be input.
- Give a verbose message when no active pools are found and pause before
exiting.
- Add verbose message when a GPU fails to initialise, and disable the correct
GPU.
- Cryptopp asm32 was not correctly updated to the incremental nonce code so the
hash counter was bogus.
- Get rid of poorly executed curl check.
- If curl does not have sockopts, do not try to compile the
json_rpc_call_sockopt_cb function, making it possible to build against older
curl libraries.
- Most people expect /usr/local when an unspecified prefix is used so change to
that.
- Rename localgen occasions to getwork fail occasions since localgen is
unrelated now.


Version 1.6.1 - August 29, 2011

- Copy cgminer path, not cat it.
- Switching between redrawing windows does not fix the crash with old
libncurses, so redraw both windows, but only when the window size hasn't
changed.
- Reinstate minimum 1 extra in queue to make it extremely unlikely to ever have
0 staged work items and any idle time.
- Return -1 if no input is detected from the menu to prevent it being
interpreted as a 0.
- Make pthread, libcurl and libcurses library checks mandatory or fail.
- Add a --disable-opencl configure option to make it possible to override
detection of opencl and build without GPU mining support.
- Confusion over the variable name for number of devices was passing a bogus
value which likely was causing the zero sized binary issue.
- cgminer no longer supports default url user and pass so remove them.
- Don't show value of intensity since it's dynamic by default.
- Add options to explicitly enable CPU mining or disable GPU mining.
- Convert the opt queue into a minimum number of work items to have queued
instead of an extra number to decrease risk of getting idle devices without
increasing risk of higher rejects.
- Statify tv_sort.
- Check for SSE2 before trying to build 32 bit SSE2 assembly version. Prevents
build failure when yasm is installed but -msse2 is not specified.
- Add some defines to configure.ac to enable exporting of values and packaging,
and clean up output.
- Give convenient summary at end of ./configure.
- Display version information and add --version command line option, and make
sure we flush stdout.
- Enable curses after the mining threads are set up so that failure messages
won't be lost in the curses interface.
- Disable curses after inputting a pool if we requested no curses interface.
- Add an option to break out after successfully mining a number of accepted
shares.
- Exit with a failed return code if we did not reach opt_shares.
- The cpu mining work data can get modified before we copy it if we submit it
async, and the sync submission is not truly sync anyway, so just submit it sync.


Version 1.6.0 - August 26, 2011

- Make restarting of GPUs optional for systems that hang on any attempt to
restart them.     Fix DEAD status by comparing it to last live time rather than
last attempted restart time since that happens every minute.
- Move staged threads to hashes so we can sort them by time.
- Create a hash list of all the blocks created and search them to detect when a
new block has definitely appeared, using that information to detect stale work
and discard it.
- Update configure.ac for newer autoconf tools.
- Use the new hashes directly for counts instead of the fragile counters
currently in use.
- Update to latest sse2 code from cpuminer-ng.
- Allow LP to reset block detect and block detect lp flags to know who really
came first.
- Get start times just before mining begins to not have very slow rise in
average.
- Add message about needing one server.
- We can queue all the necessary work without hitting frequent stales now with
the time and string stale protection active all the time.     This prevents a
pool being falsely labelled as not providing work fast enough.
- Include uthash.h in distro.
- Implement SSE2 32 bit assembly algorithm as well.
- Fail gracefully if unable to open the opencl files.
- Make cgminer look in the install directory for the .cl files making make
install work correctly.
- Allow a custom kernel path to be entered on the command line.
- Bump threshhold for lag up to maximum queued but no staged work.
- Remove fragile source patching for bitalign, vectors et. al and simply pass it
with the compiler options.
- Actually check the value returned for the x-roll-ntime extension to make sure
it isn't saying N.
- Prevent segfault on exit for when accessory threads don't exist.
- Disable curl debugging with opt protocol since it spews to stderr.


Version 1.5.8 - August 23, 2011

- Minimise how much more work can be given in cpu mining threads each interval.
- Make the fail-pause progressively longer each time it fails until the network
recovers.
- Only display the lagging message if we've requested the work earlier.
- Clean up the pool switching to not be dependent on whether the work can roll
or not by setting a lagging flag and then the idle flag.
- Only use one thread to determine if a GPU is sick or well, and make sure to
reset the sick restart attempt time.
- The worksize was unintentionally changed back to 4k by mistake, this caused a
slowdown.


Version 1.5.7 - August 22, 2011

- Fix a crash with --algo auto
- Test at appropriate target difficulty now.
- Add per-device statics log output with --per-device-stats
- Fix breakage that occurs when 1 or 4 vectors are chosen on new phatk.
- Make rolltime report debug level only now since we check it every work
item.
- Add the ability to enable/disable per-device stats on the fly and match
logging on/off.
- Explicitly tell the compiler to retain the program to minimise the chance of
the zero sized binary errors.
- Add one more instruction to avoid one branch point in the common path in the
cl return code. Although this adds more ALUs overall and more branch points, the
common path code has the same number of ALUs and one less jmp, jmps being more
expensive.
- Explicitly link in ws2_32 on the windows build and update README file on how
to compile successfully on windows.
- Release cl resources should the gpu mining thread abort.
- Attempt to restart a GPU once every minute while it's sick.
- Don't kill off the reinit thread if it fails to init a GPU but returns safely.
- Only declare a GPU dead if there's been no sign of activity from the reinit
thread for 10 mins.
- Never automatically disable any pools but just specify them as idle if they're
unresponsive at startup.
- Use any longpoll available, and don't disable it if switching to a server that
doesn't have it. This allows you to mine solo, yet use the longpoll from a pool
even if the pool is the backup server.
- Display which longpoll failed and don't free the ram for lp_url since it
belongs to the pool hdr path.
- Make the tcp setsockopts unique to linux in the hope it allows freebsd et. al
to compile.


Version 1.5.6 - August 17, 2011

- New phatk and poclbm kernels. Updated phatk to be in sync with latest 2.2
courtesy of phateus. Custom modified to work best with cgminer.
- Updated output buffer code to use a smaller buffer with the kernels.
- Clean up the longpoll management to ensure the right paths go to the right
pool and display whether we're connected to LP or not in the status line.


Version 1.5.5 - August 16, 2011

- Rework entirely the GPU restart code. Strike a balance between code that
re-initialises the GPU entirely so that soft hangs in the code are properly
managed, but if a GPU is completely hung, the thread restart code fails
gracefully, so that it does not take out any other code or devices. This will
allow cgminer to keep restarting GPUs that can be restarted, but continue
mining even if one or more GPUs hangs which would normally require a reboot.
- Add --submit-stale option which submits all shares, regardless of whether they
would normally be considered stale.
- Keep options in alphabetical order.
- Probe for slightly longer for when network conditions are lagging.
- Only display the CPU algo when we're CPU mining.
- As we have keepalives now, blaming network flakiness on timeouts appears to
have been wrong.     Set a timeout for longpoll to 1 hour, and most other
network connectivity to 1 minute.
- Simplify output code and remove HW errors from CPU stats.
- Simplify code and tidy output.
- Only show cpu algo in summary if cpu mining.
- Log summary at the end as per any other output.
- Flush output.
- Add a linux-usb-cgminer guide courtesy of Kano.


Version 1.5.4 - August 14, 2011

- Add new option: --monitor <cmd> Option lets user specify a command <cmd> that
will get forked by cgminer on startup. cgminer's stderr output subsequently gets
piped directly to this command.
- Allocate work from one function to be able to initialise variables added
later.
- Add missing fflush(stdout) for --ndevs and conclusion summary.
- Preinitialise the devices only once on startup.
- Move the non cl_ variables into the cgpu info struct to allow creating a new
cl state on reinit, preserving known GPU variables.
- Create a new context from scratch in initCQ in case something was corrupted to
maximise our chance of succesfully creating a new worker thread. Hopefully this
makes thread restart on GPU failure more reliable, without hanging everything
in the case of a completely wedged GPU.
- Display last initialised time in gpu management info, to know if a GPU has
been re-initialised.
- When pinging a sick cpu, flush finish and then ping it in a separate thread in
the hope it recovers without needing a restart, but without blocking code
elsewhere.
- Only consider a pool lagging if we actually need the work and we have none
staged despite queue requests stacking up. This decreases significantly the
amount of work that leaks to the backup pools.
- The can_roll function fails inappropriately in stale_work.
- Only put the message that a pool is down if not pinging it every minute. This
prevents cgminer from saying pool down at 1 minute intervals unless in debug
mode.
- Free all work in one place allowing us to perform actions on it in the future.
- Remove the extra shift in the output code which was of dubious benefit. In
fact in cgminer's implementation, removing this caused a miniscule speedup.
- Test each work item to see if it can be rolled instead of per-pool and roll
whenever possible, adhering to the 60 second timeout. This makes the period
after a longpoll have smaller dips in throughput, as well as requiring less
getworks overall thus increasing efficiency.
- Stick to rolling only work from the current pool unless we're in load balance
mode or lagging to avoid aggressive rolling imitating load balancing.
- If a work item has had any mining done on it, don't consider it discarded
work.


Version 1.5.3 - July 30, 2011

- Significant work went into attempting to make the thread restart code robust
to identify sick threads, tag them SICK after 1 minute, then DEAD after 5
minutes of inactivity and try to restart them. Instead of re-initialising the
GPU completely, only a new cl context is created to avoid hanging the rest of
the GPUs should the dead GPU be hung irrevocably.
- Use correct application name in syslog.
- Get rid of extra line feeds.
- Use pkg-config to check for libcurl version
- Implement per-thread getwork count with proper accounting to not over-account
queued items when local work replaces it.
- Create a command queue from the program created from source which allows us
to flush the command queue in the hope it will not generate a zero sized binary
any more.
- Be more willing to get work from the backup pools if the work is simply being
queued faster than it is being retrieved.


Version 1.5.2 - July 28, 2011

- Restarting a hung GPU can hang the rest of the GPUs so just declare it dead
and provide the information in the status.
- The work length in the miner thread gets smaller but doesn't get bigger if
it's under 1 second.     This could end up leading to CPU under-utilisation and
lower and lower hash rates.     Fix it by increasing work length if it drops
under 1 second.
- Make the "quiet" mode still update the status and display errors, and add a
new --real-quiet option which disables all output and can be set once while
running.
- Update utility and efficiency figures when displaying them.
- Some Intel HD graphics support the opencl commands but return errors since
they don't support opencl. Don't fail with them, just provide a warning and
disable GPU mining.
- Add http:// if it's not explicitly set for URL entries.
- Log to the output file at any time with warnings and errors, instead of just
when verbose mode is on.
- Display the correct current hash as per blockexplorer, truncated to 16
characters, with just the time.


Version 1.5.1 - July 27, 2011

- Two redraws in a row cause a crash in old libncurses so just do one redraw
using the main window.
- Don't adjust hash_div only up for GPUs. Disable hash_div adjustment for GPUs.
- Only free the thread structures if the thread still exists.
- Update both windows separately, but not at the same time to prevent the double
refresh crash that old libncurses has.     Do the window resize check only when
about to redraw the log window to minimise ncurses cpu usage.
- Abstract out the decay time function and use it to make hash_div a rolling
average so it doesn't change too abruptly and divide work in chunks large enough
to guarantee they won't overlap.
- Sanity check to prove locking.
- Don't take more than one lock at a time.
- Make threads report out when they're queueing a request and report if they've
failed.
- Make cpu mining work submission asynchronous as well.
- Properly detect stale work based on time from staging and discard instead of
handing on, but be more lax about how long work can be divided for up to the
scantime.
- Do away with queueing work separately at the start and let each thread grab
its own work as soon as it's ready.
- Don't put an extra work item in the queue as each new device thread will do so
itself.
- Make sure to decrease queued count if we discard the work.
- Attribute split work as local work generation.
- If work has been cloned it is already at the head of the list and when being
reinserted into the queue it should be placed back at the head of the list.
- Dividing work is like the work is never removed at all so treat it as such.
However the queued bool needs to be reset to ensure we *can* request more work
even if we didn't initially.
- Make the display options clearer.
- Add debugging output to tq_push calls.
- Add debugging output to all tq_pop calls.


Version 1.5.0 - July 26, 2011

- Increase efficiency of slow mining threads such as CPU miners dramatically. Do
this by detecting which threads cannot complete searching a work item within the
scantime and then divide up a work item into multiple smaller work items.
Detect the age of the work items and if they've been cloned before to prevent
doing the same work over. If the work is too old to be divided, then see if it
can be time rolled and do that to generate work. This dramatically decreases the
number of queued work items from a pool leading to higher overall efficiency
(but the same hashrate and share submission rate).
- Don't request work too early for CPUs as CPUs will scan for the full
opt_scantime anyway.
- Simplify gpu management enable/disable/restart code.
- Implement much more accurate rolling statistics per thread and per gpu and
improve accuracy of rolling displayed values.
- Make the rolling log-second average more accurate.
- Add a menu to manage GPUs on the fly allowing you to enable/disable GPUs or
try restarting them.
- Keep track of which GPUs are alive versus enabled.
- Start threads for devices that are even disabled, but don't allow them to
start working.
- The last pool is when we are low in total_pools, not active_pools.
- Make the thread restart do a pthread_join after disabling the device, only
re-enabling it if we succeed in restarting the thread. Do this from a separate
thread so as to not block any other code.This will allow cgminer to continue
even if one GPU hangs.
- Try to do every curses manipulation under the curses lock.
- Only use the sockoptfunction if the version of curl is recent enough.


Version 1.4.1 - July 24, 2011

- Do away with GET for dealing with longpoll forever. POST is the one that works
everywhere, not the other way around.
- Detect when the primary pool is lagging and start queueing requests on backup
pools if possible before needing to roll work.
- Load balancing puts more into the current pool if there are disabled pools.
Fix.
- Disable a GPU device should the thread fail to init.
- Out of order command queue may fail on osx. Try without if it fails.
- Fix possible dereference on blank inputs during input_pool.
- Defines missing would segfault on --help when no sse mining is built in.
- Revert "Free up resources/stale compilers." - didn't help.
- Only try to print the status of active devices or it would crash.
- Some hardware might benefit from the less OPS so there's no harm in leaving
kernel changes that do that apart from readability of the code.

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.