xmr-stak-cpu
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fireice-uk
Need Sparc and PowerPC Support
Do you mean OpenPower? It is intresting but I need to say that I am not sure if the community with such system architectures is large enough. The point is that the port will cost a lot of time and IMO the time will be better invested in porting the miner to arm.
Could you point out why this system could be a good miner architecture. I know that Power8 has hardware AES units but I don't know the throughput.
SPARC processors since T4 have included AES instructions. https://blogs.oracle.com/danx/sparc-t4-openssl-engine
So i've actually started working on this for sparc64. Getting around the SSE2 requirements is easy enough by incorporating https://github.com/nemequ/simde. In my testing this provide no performance penalty on my i7 7700K as it simply forwards native instructions if available.
The next major issue is the aes-ni instructions. It seems they are being called directly in cryptonight_aesni.h. Is there a reason not to use the OS's built in cyrpto API's and let the kernel figure out hardware acceleration? Or does this result in a performance penalty @psychocrypt
I've written some code in cpuminer-multi to take advantage of the Sparc T4 AES instructions which I could port to XMR-Stak? I used cpuminer-multi as I'm building on Solaris 11.3 which is stuck in the past as far as compiler support goes. My Sparc T4-1 system currently only does 30-50h/s on 8 virtual cores but I've not done much optimisation yet.
Can you tell me what build setup you plan to use so I can duplicate it? I can see that Solaris 11.3 can supposedly do gcc 5.1... but I couldn't figure out the crazy package masking system to get it to work.
@yuhong it is, they are calling the cpu instructions directly rather than going through the kernel api. Perhaps this provides some cross platform functionality?
The point is that the one used in Monero is slightly different, so simply feeding a key to a standard AES code isn't enough.
@megapyhor I've made the necessary changes to the PPCle conversion in this repository here:
https://github.com/oforpertainingtothesun/xmr-stak-sparc
It will also work for PPC big endian (as the original PPC conversion doesn't) so could be used (slowly) on Power 7 and earlier or on AIX.
Apologies for the lengthy build requirements, seems like Oracle have made a veritable dogs dinner of their GCC builds and don't appear to contribute much to GNU binutils. I can produce a binary release if you need me to including the GCC libs.
Out of interest, what (vaguely) are your Sparc machines normally doing? My day-job involves tooling for these machines and we're looking at supporting migration paths from Sparc to Linux on either x86 or PPCbe.