Please read this document carefully, especially the Hardware Acceleration section, if you are mining Ethash- or Equihash-based coins.
This version of excavator has initial support for OpenCL devices, including the AMD Radeon series graphics cards. This is still work in progress and mostly optimized for RX 470/480/570/580 for now. If you have any questions/concerns/feedback, please feel free to post them to:
- excavator by NiceHash (bitcointalk.org)
Alternatively, you can directly email the author at:
It is my hope that excavator would be useful for everybody with top-notch performance, solid reliability, and exceptional flexibility, and I am grateful to NiceHash for giving me an opportunity to work on this miner. Enjoy!
zawawa
Excavator should work with any OpenCL-compatible devices. For optimal performance, however, please use AMD graphics cards with the GCN2 architecture or above.
Excavator supports hardware acceleration for daggerhashimoto/Ethash- and Equihash-based coins, such as Ethereum and Zcash. In order to enable it, you need to run the miner as administrator as excavator needs to access the graphics card directly. Furthermore, for the initial run, it is very important to reset the graphics card to the stock settings, including the BIOS.
If everything goes well, you should see the following message:
Loaded phymem for direct PCIe access.
Otherwise:
Failed to load phymem.
Please run miner as administrator if you are using AMD cards.
The following algorithms are currently supported:
| Name | Supported devices | Wcount*1 | Pcount*2 |
|---|---|---|---|
| daggerhashimoto | GCN2+ | 1 | 2 |
| equihash | GCN2+ | 2 | 2 |
| pascal | GCN1+ | 4 | 3 |
| sia | GCN1+ | 4 | 2 |
| decred | GCN1+ | 4 | 4 |
If no parameters are provided, device specific defaults are used. If provided parameter is '0' then device specific default value is used.
*1 Recommended number of workers per device to reach optimal speeds.
*2 Number of supported parameters. Parameters are explained in details in section for each algorithm.
With daggerhashimoto/Ethash, excavator only supports NiceHash'es Ethereum stratum mining protocol: https://github.com/nicehash/Specifications/blob/master/EthereumStratum_NiceHash_v1.0.0.txt
| Parameter # | Range | Explanation |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0 or 1 | Disable/enable binary kernels |
| 2 | 0-∞ | Global work size |
| Parameter # | Range | Explanation |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0 or 1 | Disable/enable binary kernels |
| 2 | 0 or 1 | Disable/enable the Global Data Share (requires admin privileges) |
| Parameter # | Range | Explanation |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0-∞ | Global work size |
| 2 | 0-256 | Local work size |
| 3 | 0-∞ | Number of iterations |
| Parameter # | Range | Explanation |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0-∞ | Global work size |
| 2 | 0-256 | Local work size |
| Parameter # | Range | Explanation |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0 or 1 | Disable/enable binary kernels |
| 2 | 0-∞ | Global work size |
| 3 | 0-256 | Local work size |
| 4 | 0-∞ | Number of iterations |