Considering that CPU mining is hardly worth the time anymore, especially when solo mining, the internal CPU miner has become next to worthless. As such, remove it to reduce the amount of code that can contain bugs.
If you still want to solo mine using your CPU you can use the RPC "getwork" interface with Jeff Garzik's RPC CPU miner: https://github.com/jgarzik/cpuminer
Signed-off-by: Giel van Schijndel me@mortis.eu
PS Currently I only turn the RPC calls "getgenerate" and "setgenerate" into no-ops, should they maybe be removed instead?
There was a large discussion some time ago about this, split between people wanting to remove all mining code, and people who wanted to keep as much as possible. Eventually a middle ground was chosen: remove the SSE-optimized and assembly code, but keep a simple miner as reference. Maybe this should be reconsidered, but i suppose it will require some discussion first. I'm in favor of removing myself.
If a reference implementation is the goal then IMO it should be implemented as a seperate program using the RPC "getwork" interface.
I would argue that Jeff Garzik's RPC CPU miner (the one I mentioned before) is good enough to serve as a reference implementation. Heck the code's a lot cleaner than what's currently inside bitcoin itself.
Furthermore a good reference implementation would IMO contain only the bare essentials to illustrate the algorithm, and those expressed as simply as possible. Which would be something like a Python script containing only the "getwork" call to get work, a loop over all nonces to search for the correct one, followed by a "getwork" call when the target's matched.
Such an implementation however, would perform so poorly that no one would use it, and as a result it wouldn't be tested, making it likely to have bugs. Which is roughly the same for the builtin miner; i.e. only people who don't know or care what they're doing still use it.
+1 for removing the built-in miner, there are a couple of example implementations in the wild already.
I'd be ok with a version of this patch that completely removes the mining code but adds a reference miner (in contrib/ ). Either Jeff's or a pure-Python-no-dependencies one.
Also: setgenerate's help text should be changed like you changed getgenerate and both methods should be marked deprecated.
Agree with Gavin.
I properly marked both RPC functions as deprecated in their help text.
As for adding a reference miner, I don't think adding Jeff's to this repo is the way to go, at the most it should be moved to the github 'bitcoin' project. That being said, I can probably whip up a pessimistic (i.e. no single readability compromise for performance) Python miner for contrib/ (probably by the end of next week).
"PS Currently I only turn the RPC calls "getgenerate" and "setgenerate" into no-ops, should they maybe be removed instead?"
+1 to them being removed - and +1 for NOT including a reference miner.
A reference python miner has long existed: https://github.com/jgarzik/pyminer
I went ahead and added my python miner to bitcoin/contrib/pyminer/
IMO, let's go ahead and remove the *generate RPCs.
Rationale:
I agree, no-ops just confuse everyone. Also, is there anyone left who is actually against removing all of this?
I would personally -prefer- that the Satoshi Reference Miner remain, but if everyone else wants to remove it, it sounds like I'm outvoted...
you can still get the satoshi reference miner - its in git history ;)
I've rebased the branch against master to make it easy to merge in.
This would also mean that we can get rid of some ugly platform-specific functions in util.h/cpp which will be no longer used:
And some general functions only used by the miner:
Considering that CPU mining is hardly worth the time anymore, especially
when solo mining, the internal CPU miner has become next to worthless.
As such, remove it to reduce the amount of code that can contain bugs.
If you still want to solo mine using your CPU you can use the RPC
"getwork" interface with Jeff Garzik's RPC CPU miner:
https://github.com/jgarzik/cpuminer
Signed-off-by: Giel van Schijndel <me@mortis.eu>
Signed-off-by: Giel van Schijndel <me@mortis.eu>
Signed-off-by: Giel van Schijndel <me@mortis.eu>
I use the built-in miner quite a lot to test with testnet-in-a-box. I think we should leave it in for now.
I still disagree with leaving it in, you can just as easily mine with cpuminer on testnet-in-a-box (in fact, it would be faster) and the codebase is just generally such a mess, removing unused and unnecessary features like satoshi miner should happen ASAP.