go-cryptonight-miner

A simple Cryptonight miner written in Golang with CGO wrappers for the core cryptonight hashing functions. This miner is draws a lot of its inspiration (code) from the xmrig miner and thus exhibits similar performance.

The current implementation is more of a working prototype than a high-performant, full-fledged, cross-platform miner. Thus, it does not offer a lot of the flexibility like other projects. I'm hoping that this can be addressed via PRs by developers far more knowledgeable than me.

What does it do?

• Working CPU miner
• Working AMD GPU miner

Mining Performance

CPU mining is slightly slower than xmrig while GPU mining varies quite a bit.

CPU performance

Intel i7 4790K @ 4.4GHz

• xmrig: 289H/s
• go-cryptonight-miner: 279H/s

GPU performance

RX Vega64 @ 1458+1150MHz

The results reported below are averages over 15 minutes. The GPU was reset between measurements. Configuration: Threads: 2, Intensity: 1856/1600, Worksize: 8

• xmrig-amd: 2022H/s
• go-cryptonight-miner: 2024H/s

Configuration: Threads: 1, Intensity: 1600, Worksize: 8

• xmrig-amd: 1453H/s
• go-cryptonight-miner: 1451H/s

Note: Due to unknown reasons, in rare cases, the GPU hashrate has sometimes been observed to be ~150H/s lower than xmrig. Performing a GPU reset seems to fix this.

Build Instructions

Windows

The MSYS2 platform is required to build the miner from source.

After installing the MSYS2 platform, use the following instructions for a 32/64-bit build.

MSYS2 64-bit

Open the mingw64.exe shell and run:

pacman -Sy
pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc

MSYS2 32-bit

Open the mingw32.exe shell and run:

pacman -Sy
pacman -S mingw-w64-i686-gcc

Building the CPU miner

Navigate to cmd/cpuminer and run go build

Building the AMD GPU miner

The GPU miner requires the OpenCL libraries and headers to compile successfully.

For AMD GPUs, this requires installation of the AMD APP SDK. Once the APP SDK has been installed, the GPU miner can be built with the following commands:

cd cmd/amd-miner
go get
export  CGO_CFLAGS=-I<path-to-AMD_APP_SDK>/include/
export  CGO_LDFLAGS=-L<path-to-AMD_APP_SDK>/3.0/lib/x86_64/
go install -tags="cl11" github.com/rainliu/gocl/cl    # This speeds up future builds
go build -tags="cl11"