Follow @Openwall on Twitter for new release announcements and other news
[<prev] [next>] [<thread-prev] [thread-next>] [day] [month] [year] [list]
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2013 05:24:36 +0400
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: john-dev@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: Rafael's weekly report #6

Rafael -

On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 12:04:37AM +0100, Rafael Waldo Delgado Doblas wrote:
> 2013/7/20 Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
> > As I mentioned recently, I now think we should do Litecoin mining on
> > Parallella in cgminer codebase, separately from JtR (at least
> > initially).  We promised Litecoin mining to the Parallella community,
> > but we did not promise it to be part of JtR, and I think they're not
> > very interested in it being part of JtR (although we may consider this
> > later).  We may nevertheless use this mailing list, as I expect that
> > some of what we'd be discussing would also be relevant to Katja's
> > project, and vice versa.  I hope this project won't take too long, and
> > we'd have time left for some JtR tasks before the end of summer as well.

> I need your advice, Do you think that I should go with this task

Yes.  Like I said, we promised Litecoin mining to the Parallella
community, and there's interest in cryptocurrency mining on Parallella
boards - folks keep asking about expected speeds - e.g., see some of my
tweets on this topic yesterday and today (@solardiz).

> or do you prefer that I work in something different?

Like what?  If something specific is of interest to you, let us know!

I did think of some alternative tasks for you, but they're either more
about integration than programming (and we already got one of those with
JtR/cgminer integration - and spent too much time on it already) or are
not any easier for you than Litecoin mining on Parallella would be.
Thus, if you manage to implement Litecoin mining on Parallella within a
week and "complete" it within another week (so two weeks total), then
you'll also have time for one or more other non-trivial tasks like this.
If you fail to complete this task before the end of summer, then you'd
also fail to complete the possible alternative tasks of similar or
greater complexity.  For example, descrypt on Epiphany and/or Zynq FPGA
would be nice, but I think it'd require more mentoring from me (or from
someone else), and given my limited availability (especially in the
following two weeks) it's not a good option now.  You have already
learned a few things related to scrypt and Litecoin, whereas for
descrypt you'd be starting from scratch and would (more) likely be stuck
for these two weeks.

> In any way we need to plan
> milestones for the next task and goals, I think that this is the faster way
> to develop something.

OK, please propose a timeline for Litecoin mining on Parallella.

> Ok, if finally you want that I work on this project, I will work on CGMiner
> fork ignoring JtR code. I will develop a new driver based on thee existing
> ARM driver, I think that it wil be better use it as base even if we don't
> use the ARM CPU. I will compute different instances of scrypt on each
> Parallella core.

This sounds fine to me (although I am not familiar with cgminer codebase).

> Anyway tell me if you really want that I work on this project

Yes.  Not much choice here right now.  Just try to do it fast, and by
doing so also leave time for JtR-related tasks of similar or greater
complexity and demonstrate to us your ability to work on such tasks.

> because looks
> like it's not that much profitable to do Liteconin minning on Parallella
> and I would be working on CGMiner instead of JtR.

Yes, we realize these drawbacks.

Thanks,

Alexander

Powered by blists - more mailing lists

Confused about mailing lists and their use? Read about mailing lists on Wikipedia and check out these guidelines on proper formatting of your messages.