[Ethereum] mining with 2GB GPU with partial uploading

daggpumining

I see all older questions [*]. But I read in reddit

Yes. But your efficiency is lowered. Use ethOS dagless mining.

My question is whether this is true and which software allows this? I see ethOS is mostly a collection of other programs. I don't want to use ethOS. Which exactly miner allows this?

Best Answer

The miner software in question is closed source, so I don't know exactly how it works. But from what I've read, IIRC, it generates the parts of the DAG as needed rather than precomputing it all up-front. I would guess it uses something akin to page faults to figure out what is needed. To the best of my understanding, nothing is ever evicted from VRAM (to avoid having to recompute parts of the DAG that have already been computed). Thus, I think it's more accurate to call those miners "non-pregenerated DAG miners" or maybe "JIT DAG miners".

In any case, memory for the entire DAG in such software is still set aside to work with a nice flat memory space, so there's no getting around the memory requirements with said software, AFAIK. In fact, the online help for command line arguments for this software explicitly state that larger buffers (to contain the entirety of the DAG for later epochs) can be preallocated to improve stability which implies that space for the entire DAG must be allocated at startup.