doc: update FAQ, rename to FAQ.md.

11 years ago · 0a3710dd7b
3 changed files with 162 additions and 155 deletions
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ License: GPLv3.  See `COPYING` for details.
 Documentation is available in directory `doc`. For details on several topics, see:
 * `API` for the RPC API specification;
-* `FAQ` for frequently asked questions;
+* `FAQ.md` for frequently asked questions;
 * `GPU` for semi-obsolete information on GPU configuration options and mining SHA256d-based coins;
 * `KERNEL.md` for OpenCL kernel-related information;
 * `MINING.md` for how to find the right balance in GPU configuration to mine Scrypt-based coins effectively;
--- a/doc/FAQ
+++ b/doc/FAQ
@ -1,154 +0,0 @@
 FAQ
 Q: Can I mine on servers from different networks (eg smartcoin and bitcoin) at
 the same time?
 A: No, sgminer keeps a database of the block it's working on to ensure it does
 not work on stale blocks, and having different blocks from two networks would
 make it invalidate the work from each other.
 Q: Can I configure sgminer to mine with different login credentials or pools
 for each separate device?
 A: No.
 Q: Can I put multiple pools in the config file?
 A: Yes, check the example.conf file. Alternatively, set up everything either on
 the command line or via the menu after startup and choose settings->write
 config file and the file will be loaded one each startup.
 Q: The build fails with gcc is unable to build a binary.
 A: Remove the "-march=native" component of your CFLAGS as your version of gcc
 does not support it.
 Q: Can you implement feature X?
 A: I can, but time is limited, and people who donate are more likely to get
 their feature requests implemented.
 Q: Work keeps going to my backup pool even though my primary pool hasn't
 failed?
 A: sgminer checks for conditions where the primary pool is lagging and will
 pass some work to the backup servers under those conditions. The reason for
 doing this is to try its absolute best to keep the GPUs working on something
 useful and not risk idle periods. You can disable this behaviour with the
 option --failover-only.
 Q: Is this a virus?
 A: sgminer is being packaged with other trojan scripts and some antivirus
 software is falsely accusing sgminer.exe as being the actual virus, rather
 than whatever it is being packaged with. If you installed sgminer yourself,
 then you do not have a virus on your computer. Complain to your antivirus
 software company. They seem to be flagging even source code now from sgminer
 as viruses, even though text source files can't do anything by themself.
 Q: Can you modify the display to include more of one thing in the output and
 less of another, or can you change the quiet mode or can you add yet another
 output mode?
 A: Everyone will always have their own view of what's important to monitor.
 The defaults are very sane and I have very little interest in changing this
 any further.
 Q: What are the best parameters to pass for X pool/hardware/device.
 A: Virtually always, the DEFAULT parameters give the best results. Most user
 defined settings lead to worse performance. The ONLY thing most users should
 need to set is the Intensity for GPUs.
 Q: What happened to CPU mining?
 A: Being increasingly irrelevant for most users, and a maintenance issue, it is
 no longer under active development and will not be supported. No binary builds
 supporting CPU mining will be released. Virtually all remaining users of CPU
 mining are as back ends for illegal botnets. The main reason sgminer is being
 inappopriately tagged as a virus by antivirus software is due to the trojans
 packaging a CPU mining capable version of it. There is no longer ANY CPU mining
 code in sgminer. If you are mining bitcoin with CPU today, you are spending
 1000x more in electricity costs than you are earning in bitcoin.
 Q: GUI version?
 A: No. The RPC interface makes it possible for someone else to write one
 though.
 Q: I'm having an issue. What debugging information should I provide in the
 bug report?
 A: Start sgminer with your regular commands and add -D -T --verbose and provide
 the full startup output and a summary of your hardware, operating system, AMD
 driver version and AMD APP SDK version (if installed separately).
 Q: Why don't you provide win64 builds?
 A: Win32 builds work everywhere and there is precisely zero advantage to a
 64 bit build on windows.
 Q: Is it faster to mine on windows or linux?
 A: It makes no difference. It comes down to choice of operating system for
 their various features. Linux offers much better long term stability and
 remote monitoring and security, while windows offers you overclocking tools
 that can achieve much more than sgminer can do on linux.
 Q: Can I mine with sgminer on a MAC?
 A: sgminer will compile on OSX, but the performance of GPU mining is
 compromised due to the opencl implementation on OSX, there is no temperature
 or fanspeed monitoring, and the cooling design of most MACs, despite having
 powerful GPUs, will usually not cope with constant usage leading to a high
 risk of thermal damage. It is highly recommended not to mine on a MAC.
 Q: I switch users on windows and my mining stops working?
 A: That's correct, it does. It's a permissions issue that there is no known
 fix for due to monitoring of GPU fanspeeds and temperatures. If you disable
 the monitoring with --no-adl it should switch okay.
 Q: My network gets slower and slower and then dies for a minute?
 A; Try the --net-delay option.
 Q: How do I tune for p2pool?
 A: p2pool has very rapid expiration of work and new blocks, it is suggested you
 decrease intensity by 1 from your optimal value, and decrease GPU threads to 1
 with -g 1. It is also recommended to use --failover-only since the work is
 effectively like a different block chain.
 Q: Are OpenCL kernels from other mining software useable in sgminer?
 A: No, the APIs are slightly different between the different software and they
 will not work.
 Q: I run PHP on windows to access the API with the example miner.php. Why does
 it fail when php is installed properly but I only get errors about Sockets not
 working in the logs?
 A: http://us.php.net/manual/en/sockets.installation.php
 Q: Can I mine scrypt with FPGAs or ASICs?
 A: As of Jan 15 2014, no.
 Q: What is stratum and how do I use it?
 A: Stratum is a protocol designed for pooled mining in such a way as to
 minimise the amount of network communications, yet scale to hardware of any
 speed. With versions of sgminer 2.8.0+, if a pool has stratum support, sgminer
 will automatically detect it and switch to the support as advertised if it can.
 If you input the stratum port directly into your configuration, or use the
 special prefix "stratum+tcp://" instead of "http://", sgminer will ONLY try to
 use stratum protocol mining. The advantages of stratum to the miner are no
 delays in getting more work for the miner, less rejects across block changes,
 and far less network communications for the same amount of mining hashrate. If
 you do NOT wish sgminer to automatically switch to stratum protocol even if it
 is detected, add the --fix-protocol option.
 Q: Why don't the statistics add up: Accepted, Rejected, Stale, Hardware Errors,
 Diff1 Work, etc. when mining greater than 1 difficulty shares?
 A: As an example, if you look at 'Difficulty Accepted' in the RPC API, the number
 of difficulty shares accepted does not usually exactly equal the amount of work
 done to find them. If you are mining at 8 difficulty, then you would expect on
 average to find one 8 difficulty share, per 8 single difficulty shares found.
 However, the number is actually random and converges over time, it is an average,
 not an exact value, thus you may find more or less than the expected average.
 Q: Why do the scrypt diffs not match with the current difficulty target?
 A: The current scrypt block difficulty is expressed in terms of how many
 multiples of the BTC difficulty it currently is (eg 28) whereas the shares of
 "difficulty 1" are actually 65536 times smaller than the BTC ones. The diff
 expressed by sgminer is as multiples of difficulty 1 shares.
 Q: Can I make a donation?
 A: Yes, see AUTHORS.md for authors' donation addresses.
 Q: What should my Work Utility (WU) be?
 A: Work utility is the product of hashrate * luck and only stabilises over a
 very long period of time. Assuming all your work is valid work, bitcoin mining
 should produce a work utility of approximately 1 per 71.6MH. This means at
 5GH you should have a WU of 5000 / 71.6 or ~ 69. You cannot make your machine
 do "better WU" than this - it is luck related. However you can make it much
 worse if your machine produces a lot of hardware errors producing invalid work.
--- a/doc/FAQ.md
+++ b/doc/FAQ.md
@ -0,0 +1,161 @@
 # FAQ
 Q: Can I mine on servers from different networks (eg litecoin and
 dogecoin) at the same time?
 A: No, sgminer keeps a database of the block it's working on to ensure
 it does not work on stale blocks, and having different blocks from two
 networks would make it invalidate the work from each other.
 Q: Can I configure sgminer to mine with different login credentials or
 pools for each separate device?
 A: No.
 Q: Can I put multiple pools in the config file?
 A: Yes, check the `example.conf` file. Alternatively, set up everything
 either on the command line or via the menu after startup and choose
 `Settings -> Write config file`.
 Q: The build fails with `gcc is unable to build a binary`.
 A: Remove the "-march=native" component of your `CFLAGS` as your version
 of gcc does not support it.
 Q: Can you implement feature X?
 A: I can, but time is limited, and people who donate are more likely to
 get their feature requests implemented.
 Q: Work keeps going to my backup pool even though my primary pool
 hasn't failed?
 A: sgminer checks for conditions where the primary pool is lagging and
 will pass some work to the backup servers under those conditions. The
 reason for doing this is to try its absolute best to keep the GPUs
 working on something useful and not risk idle periods. You can disable
 this behaviour with the option --failover-only.
 Q: Is this a virus?
 A: sgminer is being packaged with other trojan
 scripts and some antivirus software is falsely accusing sgminer.exe as
 being the actual virus, rather than whatever it is being packaged with.
 If you had built sgminer yourself, then you do not have a virus on your
 computer. Complain to your antivirus software company..
 Q: Can you modify the display to include more of one thing in the output
 and less of another, or can you change the quiet mode or can you add
 yet another output mode?
 A: Everyone will always have their own view of what's important to
 monitor. The shipped NCurses TUI is intentionally ascetic, and is only
 provided as a fallback. It is recomended to use an API client if you
 want to customise the display.
 Q: GUI version?
 A: No. The API makes it possible for someone else to write one though.
 Q: What are the best parameters to pass for pool / hardware / device?
 A: See `doc/MINING.md` in your source distribution directory, or
 [doc/MINING.md](https://github.com/veox/sgminer/blob/master/doc/MINING.md]
 for an online version. Note that the latter is for the latest
 development version, and arguments listed there are not necessarily
 available in your local version.
 Q: Is CPU mining supported?
 A: No. Consider using [cpuminer](https://github.com/pooler/cpuminer).
 Q: I'm having an issue. What debugging information should I provide in
 the bug report?
 A: See `doc/BUGS.md` in your source distribution directory, or
 [doc/BUGS.md](https://github.com/veox/sgminer/blob/master/doc/BUGS.md]
 for an online version.
 Q: Why don't you provide binaries?
 A: Binaries are a hassle to maintain. On Linux, they should be provided
 by your distribution's package manager anyway. Runnning an unoptimised
 binary gives a minor performance penalty. Running binaries from
 untrusted providers is a security risk. There has not been sufficient
 community interest to provide distributed determininstic builds.
 Q: Is it better to mine on Linux or Windows?
 A: It comes down to choice of operating system for their various
 features. Linux offers specialised mining distributions, much better
 long term stability, remote monitoring and security, while Windows
 offers overclocking tools that can achieve much more than sgminer can do
 on Linux. YMMV.
 Q: Can I mine with sgminer on a Mac?
 A: sgminer will compile on OSX, but the performance of GPU mining
 is compromised due to the OpenCL implementation on OSX, there is no
 temperature or fanspeed monitoring, and the cooling design will usually
 not cope with constant usage leading to a high risk of thermal damage.
 It is highly recommended not to mine on a Mac.
 Q: I switch users on Windows and my mining stops working?
 A: That's correct, it does. It's a permissions issue that there is no
 known fix for due to monitoring of GPU fanspeeds and temperatures. If
 you disable the monitoring with `--no-adl` it should switch okay.
 Q: My network gets slower and slower and then dies for a minute?
 A: Try the `--net-delay` option.
 Q: How do I tune for P2Pool?
 A: P2Pool has very rapid expiration of work and new blocks, it is
 suggested you decrease intensity, decrease `scantime` and `expiry`,
 and/or decrease GPU threads to 1 with `-g 1`. It is also recommended to
 use `--failover-only` since the work is effectively a separate
 blockchain.
 Q: Are OpenCL kernels from other mining software usable in sgminer?
 A: Most often no.
 Q: How do I add my own kernel?
 A: See `doc/KERNEL.md` in your source distribution directory, or
 [doc/KERNEL.md](https://github.com/veox/sgminer/blob/master/doc/KERNEL.md]
 for an online version.
 Q: I run PHP on Windows to access the API with the example
 `miner.php`. Why does it fail when PHP is installed properly but
 I only get errors about Sockets not working in the logs?
 A: http://us.php.net/manual/en/sockets.installation.php
 Q: Will sgminer support FPGAs or ASICs?
 A: No. sgminer will only support GPUs. It is bad software design
 practice to try and support every gadget out there. Developers
 for dedicated hardware products are better off creating standalone
 software.
 Q: What is stratum and how do I use it?
 A: Stratum is a protocol designed for pooled mining in such a way as to
 minimise the amount of network communications, yet scale to hardware
 of any speed. If a pool has stratum support (and most public ones do),
 sgminer will automatically detect it and switch to the support as
 advertised if it can. If you input the stratum port directly into your
 configuration, or use the special prefix `stratum+tcp://` instead of
 `http://`, sgminer will ONLY try to use stratum protocol mining. The
 advantages of stratum to the miner are no delays in getting more work
 for the miner, less rejects across block changes, and far less network
 communications for the same amount of mining hashrate. If you do not
 wish sgminer to automatically switch to stratum protocol even if it is
 detected, add the `--fix-protocol` option.
 Q: Why don't the statistics add up: Accepted, Rejected, Stale, Hardware
 Errors, Diff1 Work, etc. when mining greater than 1 difficulty shares?
 A: As an example, if you look at 'Difficulty Accepted' in the RPC API,
 the number of difficulty shares accepted does not usually exactly equal
 the amount of work done to find them. If you are mining at 8 difficulty,
 then you would expect on average to find one 8 difficulty share, per 8
 single difficulty shares found. However, the number is actually random
 and converges over time, it is an average, not an exact value, thus you
 may find more or less than the expected average.
 Q: Why do the scrypt diffs not match with the current difficulty target?
 A: The current scrypt block difficulty is expressed in terms of how
 many multiples of the BTC difficulty it currently is (eg 28) whereas
 the shares of "difficulty 1" are actually 65536 times smaller than the
 BTC ones. The diff expressed by sgminer is as multiples of difficulty 1
 shares.
 Q: Can I make a donation?
 A: Yes, see AUTHORS.md for authors' donation addresses.
 Q: What is Work Utility (WU)?
 A: Work utility is the product of hashrate * luck and only stabilises
 over a very long period of time. Luck includes hardware error rate,
 share reject rate and other parameters. Therefore, it is often a better
 indicator of hardware or software misconfiguration.