For our Ethereum mining rig a coworker of mine wrote a systemd template unit so it is relatively easy to configure which graphic card in the rig is assigned to whom.

For each of the GPU owners exist a custom configuration file /etc/sysconfig/ethminer-$USERNAME (/etc/sysconfig/ethminer-ckl in my case). The file contains the following parameters:

ETHER_ADDRESS=0xYOUR_HASH
EMAIL_ADDRESS=<your email address>
# use first three GPUs, last three would be 3 4 5
OPENCL_DEVICES=0 1 2

Each user has its own configuration file and all services can be started like

systemctl start ethminer@ckl

But when ethminer was started by using systemctl start only the first GPU in the defintion was used – GPU 0 in the configuration sample above. systemd itself called the ethminer binary in a correct way and the same command line worked when executed by hand. The problem occurred by how systemd passes arguments and how ethminer reads the them. In the end I fixed it by wrapping the ethminer command in a sub-bash process. Our unit definition in /etc/sysconfig/ethminer@.service looked like this:

[Unit]
Description=Mine Ether for %i
After=network.target


[Service]
User=nobody
EnvironmentFile=/etc/sysconfig/ethminer-%I
# BEFORE AND NOT WORKING
# ExecStart=/usr/bin/ethminer --farm-recheck 2000 -G -S eth-eu1.nanopool.org:9999 -O ${ETHER_ADDRESS}/rig02/${EMAIL_ADDRESS} --opencl-devices ${OPENCL_DEVICES}

ExecStart=/bin/bash --login -c "/usr/bin/ethminer --farm-recheck 2000 -G -S eth-eu1.nanopool.org:9999 -O ${ETHER_ADDRESS}/rig02/${EMAIL_ADDRESS} --opencl-devices ${OPENCL_DEVICES}"

Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

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1 Comment

Running multiple Claymore miner instances - schakko.de · July 12, 2017 at 2:05 am

[…] Miner because ethminer has problems running multiple instances with multiple GPUs. My blog post How to run same ethminer instance with multiple GPUs is still valid but ethminer simply can’t handle two or more parallel running […]

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