Mining with AMDGPU PRO

One good reason for using Mint as our OS is that it’s based on Ubuntu 16.04, which is one of three distributions “officially” supported by the proprietary AMDGPU-PRO driver. This isn’t usually something to sing about, and this driver is outperformed by Mesa in most games. But the proprietary stack includes a technically superior OpenCL stack, which, amongst other things, makes for faster GPU mining of cryptocurrencies.

Modern AMD cards (the RX400, 500 and Vega series) are in general considered better suited to mining than their Nvidia counterparts (although the 1050Ti deserves an honourable bang-for-buck mention). Even the older ones (the aging 7950, and those based on 2013’s Sea Islands and later) can produce impressive hashrates, though they’re not the most efficient beasts. The proprietary bits (500MB of them) work in tandem with the FOSS amdgpu kernel module, and can be downloaded from http:// support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/ Radeon-Software-for-Linux-Release-Notes.aspx. Extract the file with tar -xvJf amdgpu-pro-xyz. tar.xz . The installer won’t work with Mint unless we twist its arm, so do:

$ cd amd amdgpu-pro-xyz/ $ sed -i ‘s/ubuntu)/ubuntu \| linuxmint)/’ amdgpu-pro-install $ ./amdgpu-pro-install

If you just want the compute drivers, then add --headless to the last command. You can even choose between the legacy and ROCM OpenCL (or both) stacks with --opencl=legacy,rocm . If things go south you may want to uninstall the drivers with amdgpu-pro-uninstall .

We’ve been getting rich mining Ethereum (ETH) with Claymore’s miner ( https://github. com/nanopool/Claymore-Dual-Miner) and Monero (XMR) with xmrig ( https://github.

com/xmrig/xmrig-amd). The Milky Bars are on us, readers! ( no,theyarenot!– Ed)