Update NEWS and README.

NEWS

@@ -1,3 +1,155 @@
+Version 2.8.0 - October 7, 2012
+
+- Major upgrade - support for the stratum mining protocol.
+- Fix various modminer warnings on mingw.
+- Fix sign warning on windows build for bitforce.
+- Cast socketfail to integer since SOCKET is an unsigned int on windows.
+- Use strtod not strtol for bitforce temp backup.
+- Cope with broken drivers returning nonsense values for bitforce temperatures.
+- Minor warning fixes.
+- Use the stratum thread to detect when a stratum pool has died based on no
+message for 2 minutes.
+- Only set the stratum auth flag once and once the stratum thread is started,
+use that to set/unset the stratum active flag.
+- Only hand off to stratum from getwork if we succeed in initiating the
+protocol.
+- Target should only be 32 bytes copied.
+- Use a static array for work submission data instead of stack memory.
+- Clear the buffer data before sprinting to it.
+- Clear work stratum strings before setting them and add them to debug output.
+- Drop stratum connect failed message to verbose level only since it's a regular
+probing message.
+- TCP Keepalive in curl is only in very recent versions and not required with
+regular messages on stratum anyway.
+- Move stratum sockets to curl infrastructure with locking around send+recv to
+begin support for proxies and ssl.
+- Make detect stratum fail if a proxy has been set up.
+- Stratum does not currently have any proxy support so do not try to switch to
+stratum if a proxy has been specified.
+- Windows doesn't work with MSG_PEEK on recv so move to a continuously updating
+buffer for incoming messages.
+- Alloca is unreliable on windows so use static arrays in util.c stratum code.
+- Begin support for mingw stratum build.
+- Add space to reject reason.
+- Parse the reject reason where possible from stratum share submission.
+- Pass json error value to share result function to be able to parse reject
+reason in stratum.
+- Don't try to parse unneeded parameters in response to mining.subscribe.
+- Remove the sshare hash entry if we failed to send it.
+- Change notify message to info level to avoid spamming repeatedly when a pool
+is down.
+- Check the stratum pool difference has not changed compared to the work diff
+when testing whether a share meets the target or not and retarget if necessary.
+- Bit error in target calculation for stratum.
+- Set work_block in gen_stratum_work for when work is reused to avoid thinking
+it's all stale.
+- Offset the current block detection to the prev block hash.
+- We should be testing for id_val, not id in parse stratum response.
+- Make target on stratum scale to any size by clearing sequential bits according
+to diff.
+- Correct target calculation in gen_stratum_work.
+- If a share result has an error code but still has an id, it is likely a
+reject, not an error.
+- Initiate stratum the first time in pool_active only, allowing us to switch to
+it on getting a failed getwork and detecting the presence of stratum on the url
+at that time.
+- Use 5 second timeout on sock full for now as a temporary workaround.
+- If no stratum url is set by the end of the detect stratum routine, copy the
+sockaddr url.
+- Make all buffers slightly larger to prevent overflow.
+- Make the stratum recv buffer larger than the recvsize.
+- Userpass needs to be copied to user and pass earlier to allow stratum
+authorisation to work with it.
+- Store a sockaddr url of the stripped url used in determining sockaddr to not
+confuse it with the stratum url and fix build warnings.
+- Decrease the queued count with stratum work once it's staged as well.
+- Allow the stratum retry to initiate and auth stratum in pool_alive to make
+sure the stratum thread is started.
+- Avoid duplicating pool->rpc_url and setting pool->stratum_url twice to itself.
+- Detect if a getwork based pool has the X-Stratum header on startup, and if so,
+switch to the stratum based pool.
+- Comment update.
+- Minor message change.
+- Create a work item from a "clean" request from stratum allowing the new block
+to be detected and the appropriate block change message to be given.
+- Use statically allocated stratum strings in struct work to cope with the
+inability to safely deallocate dynamically allocated ram.
+- Use the current pool when deciding whether to reuse work from a stratum source
+rather than the work's previous pool.
+- Copy the stratum url to the rpc url to avoid none being set.
+- Provide locking around stratum send operations to avoid races.
+- Submit shares from stratum through the abstracted submit share function
+detecting what message they belong to and showing the data from the associated
+work, and then deleting it from the hash.
+- Use a more robust mechanism to obtain a \n terminated string over a socket.
+- Abstract out share submit as a function to be useable by stratum.
+- Rename parse_stratum to parse_method as it is only for stratum messages that
+contain methods.
+- Display stratum as mechanism in status line when current pool is running it.
+- Count each stratum notify as a getwork equivalent.
+- Correct nonce submitted with share.
+- Extranonce2 should be added before coinbase2.
+- We should be hashing the binary coinbase, not the hex one.
+- Fix endianness of nonce submitted for stratum.
+- Check that stratum is already active in initiate_stratum to avoid
+de-authorising ourselves by subscribing again.
+- Begin implementing a hash database of submissions and attempt sending results.
+- Copy parameters from stratum work required for share submission.
+- Set lagging flag on first adding a pool to prevent pool slow warning at
+startup.
+- Fix work->target being a 32 byte binary in gen_stratum_work.
+- Store and display stripped url in its own variable.
+- Create machinery to divert work requests to stratum.
+- Generate the work target in gen_stratum_work, setting default diff to 1 in
+case it is not yet set.
+- Generate work data, midstate and hash1 in gen_stratum_work.
+- Generate header created from stratum structures in gen_stratum_work.
+- Generate merkle root hash in gen_stratum_work.
+- Generate the coinbase for generation of stratum based work.
+- The number of transactions is variable so make merkle a variable length
+dynamically allocated array and track how many there are for stratum.
+- Rename nonce2 to n2size reflecting that it's a size variable and not the
+actual nonce.
+- Provide rudimentary support for stratum clean work command in the stratum
+thread.
+- Cope with pools being removed in the stratum thread.
+- Use the pool sock value directly in the stratum thread in case it changes
+after reconnecting.
+- Create a stratum thread per pool that has stratum that monitors the socket and
+serves received data.
+- Check return value of stratum_parse.
+- Complete authorisation in stratum.
+- Implement stratum parsing of notify parameters and storing them in the pool
+stratum work structure.
+- Create helper functions for duplicating json strings to avoid keeping json
+references in use.
+- Append \n in the sock_send function instead of adding it when constructing
+json in stratum.
+- Don't keep any json references around with stratum structures.
+- Create parse_stratum function that hands off stratum parameters to other
+functions to manage pool stratum work struct variables. Implement mining
+difficulty setting.
+- Create helper functions for checking when a socket is ready to read on and
+receive a single line at a time. Begin stratum authorisation process.
+- Provide a helper function for reading a single \n terminated string from a
+socket.
+- Create a stratum work structure to store current work variables.
+- Test specifically for stratum being active in pool_active.
+- Detect stratum in common place when adding urls, and use a bool to tell us
+when it's active.
+- Fix warnings.
+- Extract and store various parameters on stratum init confirming successful
+mining notify.
+- Use existing socket macros and close the socket on failure in init stratum.
+- Initiate stratum and grab first json result.
+- Get detailed addressinfo from the parsed URL for future raw socket usage when
+possible. IPV4 only for now.
+- Prepare for getaddrinfo call.
+- Add data structures to pool struct for socket communications.
+- Put all socket definitions in util.h to allow reusing by added socket
+functions to be used in util.c.
+
+
 Version 2.7.7 - October 7, 2012
 
 - Fix unused warnings on ming build.

README

@@ -304,6 +304,10 @@ Single pool with a socks5 proxy, regular desktop:
 
 cgminer -o "socks5:proxy:port|http://pool:port" -u username -p password
 
+Single pool with stratum protocol support:
+
+cgminer -o stratum+tcp://pool:port -u username -p password
+
 The list of proxy types are:
  http:    standard http 1.1 proxy
  http0:   http 1.0 proxy
@@ -908,6 +912,18 @@ To permanently give your account the 'dialout' group:
  sudo usermod -G dialout -a `whoami`
 Then logout and back in again
 
+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 cgminer 2.8.0+, if a pool has stratum support, cgminer
+will automatically detect it and switch to the support as advertised if it can.
+Stratum uses direct TCP connections to the pool and thus it will NOT currently
+work through a http proxy but will work via a socks proxy if you need to use
+one. If you input the stratum port directly into your configuration, or use the
+special prefix "stratum+tcp://" instead of "http://", cgminer 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.
 
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