Bitcoin 4

Okay, we need to put this Bitcoin thing to bed. It is now or never.

At the end of our last episode we were considering using mxe. This turns out to be a bit of a rabbit hole… libcurl dev is missing, and there are complicated instructions as to how to fix this. Sounds like a time sink so we are going to try another avenue.

The garbagey old linux box we used in episode 2 had an NVIDIA card, but our garbagey old windows box has AMD, which seems friendlier to opencl. So, I have installed Ubuntu 20.04 alongside windows on the AMD machine, and we’re going to find out if we’ve perhaps made a slightly less garbagey linux box.

As usual we have to install autoconf, libtool, and libcurl4-openssl-dev. Then run autoreconf -i, ./configure --enable-opencl, and make. This brings us the following error:

config.status: executing depfiles commands
config.status: error: in `/home/jborland/Documents/cgminer-3.7.2':
config.status: error: Something went wrong bootstrapping makefile fragments
    for automatic dependency tracking.  Try re-running configure with the
    '--disable-dependency-tracking' option to at least be able to build
    the package (albeit without support for automatic dependency tracking).
See `config.log' for more details

Looking through config.log, it looks like gcc is not understanding some of the options it’s being fed. Furthermore it looks like it’s gcc 9.3.0. Weren’t we using 10-something in cygwin? Well before we upgrade, let’s follow this dependency tracking advice and see if we get any farther.

That seems to work, but it can’t see OpenCL, and AMD’s latest drivers are for Ubuntu 18.04! They won’t install on 20.04. For pete’s sake. Thanks to this tip we locate an older version that doesn’t refuse to install on a newer OS. This card is older than dirt anyway, right? How much could this stuff really have changed since 16.04.

Well that doesn’t fly, unsurprisingly I suppose. So let’s be good little girls and boys and start over with 18.04, which the newer AMD drivers should play nice with.

I used an old 18.04 install disk, and turns out it has a 4.15 kernel that AMD doesn’t like! So, I upgrade to the 5.4 kernel, and uninstall and reinstall the AMD drivers. This quickly turns into a dumpster fire.

Installing 1804.4 from the outset seems to be the way to go. And I also discover that I need to install pkg-config for this all to work.

And ocl-icd-opencl-dev.

IT’S ALIVE! I will put the whole recipe together in a new post.