Figured out e3 issues
Posted: Wed Apr 17, 2019 7:25 pm
After two weeks of investigation, I'm happy to report that we were finally able to determine the cause of the e3 ethash miner issues.
We determined that when Antminer developed the e3, the company never tested its firmware on coin switching, or they never intended the miner to support coin switching at all. The e3 works great when it switches from a coin with a lower block number to one with a higher block (and DAG) number, but not the other way around. Of course, in mining a static coin, the block number never decreases, so there would be no reason to design and test for new work at a lower block number if you never conceived or intended for the miner to do that.
Unfortunately, it will not be possible for e3s to switch coins. With an e3, you can still use the "c=" argument to mine any coin you'd like. We will release a new version of the mining server tomorrow that will add some optimizations to reduce stale shares for e3s, and which will default all e3 miners to statically mining Ethereum unless they use "c=" to mine a different coin.
We determined that when Antminer developed the e3, the company never tested its firmware on coin switching, or they never intended the miner to support coin switching at all. The e3 works great when it switches from a coin with a lower block number to one with a higher block (and DAG) number, but not the other way around. Of course, in mining a static coin, the block number never decreases, so there would be no reason to design and test for new work at a lower block number if you never conceived or intended for the miner to do that.
Unfortunately, it will not be possible for e3s to switch coins. With an e3, you can still use the "c=" argument to mine any coin you'd like. We will release a new version of the mining server tomorrow that will add some optimizations to reduce stale shares for e3s, and which will default all e3 miners to statically mining Ethereum unless they use "c=" to mine a different coin.