Edit

Optimizing Mining on a RPi

Notes

Looking for a more general SBC setup guide? Check out this guide.

Overview

To maximize your hashrate, it is very important that you select a 64-bit OS image, a quality miner and the most current compiler that you can.

OS Image

The 64-bit Ubuntu Server for Raspberry Pi3 is a good choice:

https://ubuntu.com/download/raspberry-pi

You will need to write this image to an SD card with a utility such as Etcher. Once your OS is written, insert your SD Card and boot your Pi.

Once you've got it booted, you'll be asked for a username and password. These are both ubuntu.

Once you've logged in, you'll be asked to change the password. For the current password, enter ubuntu again. Then, enter a new password, and confirm it.

Get the Latest Compiler

You will need to edit your sources.list file and add the debian testing repository in order to install gcc-8 and g++-8 on your system:

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Add this line to the end of the file:

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian testing main contrib non-free

Then save it with Ctrl-x and then the following:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gcc-8 g++-8

Download Compile, and Configure Your Miner

Now you need to install the required dependencies and the latest release of the xmrig miner and compile it with gcc-8.

sudo apt-get install git build-essential cmake libuv1-dev libmicrohttpd-dev libssl-dev
git clone https://github.com/xmrig/xmrig.git
cd xmrig
sudo mkdir build
cd build
sudo cmake .. -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=gcc-8 -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=g++-8
sudo make -j4

Compiling the miner could take several minutes to complete. When your miner is ready you need to create a configuration file with your traaittXTCASH settings. Navigate to your home directory and create a file named config.json.xtcash.

cd ~
sudo nano config.json.xtcash

Populate your configuration file with something similar to the code below. Make sure that url, user, and pass are populated with the your own unique and proper values.

{
    "algo": "chukwa",
    "background": false,
    "colors": true,
    "retries": 5,
    "retry-pause": 5,
    "donate-level": 1,
    "syslog": false,
    "log-file": null,
    "print-time": 60,
    "av": 0,
    "safe": false,
    "max-cpu-usage": 100,
    "cpu-priority": null,
    "threads": null,
    "pools": [
        {
            "url": "YOUR_POOL_URL_PLUS_PORT_GOES_HERE",
            "user": "YOUR_XTCASH_ADDRESS_GOES_HERE",
            "pass": "YOUR_MINER_NAME_GOES_HERE",
            "keepalive": true,
            "nicehash": false,
            "variant": -1
        }
    ]
}

Create a separate miner start script so that you can easily start the miner and invoke the proper cofiguration file with a single command. I like to name it "minextcash".

sudo nano minextcasg

Place the following code into the minextcash file:

#!/bin/bash
sudo sysctl -w vm.nr_hugepages=8
~/xmrig/build/xmrig --config=config.json.xtcash

Make the file executable as a script:

sudo chmod +x minextcash

Now you can start the miner using the start script:

./minextcash

Conclusion

Happy mining and make sure to support small pools and keep it mining decentralized.