bitcoin generation broken in 0.3.8? (64-bit)

3 messages lfm, Satoshi Nakamoto August 7, 2010 — August 9, 2010
lfm August 7, 2010 Source · Permalink

I was starting to wonder when my systems seemed to quit generating coins if there was something going on. They went from about 1 block / day to none in a week.

ArtForz in irc suggested I run a test isolated net with two nodes only connected to each other with empty wallet dir. I took a couple of quad core systems and set them up. they have produced no blocks in about 90 minutes now while hashing at a combined rate of over 8000 khash/sec. Is this evidence of a problem yet or is it more bad luck?

The systems are Linux 64 bit one Intel quad q6600 and one AMD quad phenom II 940.

Satoshi Nakamoto August 9, 2010 Source · Permalink

I found that SSE2 only added a slight 2% speedup, which didn’t seem worth the incompatibility.  I was trying to take the safer option.

It doesn’t look to me like Crypto++ could be deciding whether to use SSE2 at runtime.  There’s one place where it detects SSE2 for deciding some block count parameter, but the SSE2 stuff is all #ifdef at compile time and I can’t see how that would switch at runtime.  Maybe I’m not looking in the right place.

Should we enable SSE2 in all the makefiles?  It seems like we must in case someone compiles with 64-bit.

I will recompile the 64-bit part of the Linux 0.3.8 release.

Satoshi Nakamoto August 9, 2010 Source · Permalink

I uploaded 0.3.8.1 for Linux with re-built 64-bit.  I ran a difficulty 1 test with it and it has generated blocks.

http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=765.0

Download: http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/Bitcoin/bitcoin-0.3.8/bitcoin-0.3.8.1-linux.tar.gz/download