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Development Update: Braiins OS & Braiins OS+ 20.09

Discussing newly added support for Antminer S17 and S17 Pro models, 0% fees on Braiins Pool (formerly Slush Pool), and more.

Published on Sep 08, 2020

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Published on Sep 08, 2020

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Braiins OS+ 20.09 Overview

If you’ve already been using Braiins OS+ on Antminer S9s, you’ll find the features for the S17 models familiar. In case you haven’t, we’ll summarize them here:

Per-chip autotuning: automatically adjusts the frequencies on each individual chip so that the higher quality chips do more hashing relative to the lower quality chips, thereby increasing the overall efficiency of the ASIC at any power consumption level. (For more details, read Autotuning — The Best Thing for Bitcoin Miners Since AsicBoost.)
Dynamic Power Scaling: when this feature is enabled, BOSminer (our replacement of CGminer) automatically reduces the device’s power limit when the specified “Hot Temperature” is reached to prevent overheating without shutting down the miner.

BOS+ Toolbox: tool that can be used for easy batch installation and configuration as well as executing custom batch commands to manage devices remotely.
Auto-upgrade: whenever we publish a major release, your devices will automatically upgrade to it. This setting is turned on by default when you install Braiins OS+, but it can be easily enabled or disabled via the BOS+ Toolbox or the web UI — see Docs.
Saved autotuning profiles: anytime the autotuning process completes at a new specified power limit, the tuning profile will be saved in BOSminer so that it can be reapplied when you reboot the device or after using a different power setting.

Changelog 20.09

This release brings support for Antminer S17 and S17 Pro and includes a maintenance release for the Antminer S9 family.

All mining hardware types

[feature] implemented referral program - sellers of Braiins OS+ can now acquire a referral package (with a referral ID and configuration file) which will send them a portion of the devfee collected when applied by the referees.

Known issues

[issue] displayed power consumption for S17 and S17 Pro is lower than the actual power consumption, this will be improved in the next releases.

[issue] BOSminer is slow at reconnecting to the pool when the internet provider changes the IP address for the user

You can view the changelog also in our documentation.

See the full changelog

You can find more in-depth descriptions of the last 4 features in our previous Braiins OS+ Development Update.

One other important note: Despite having a full feature-match of the 20.06 release in 20.09 for the S17 and S17 Pro, we have labeled this a beta. The reason is that limited testing has been conducted externally on this release, so we want miners to proceed with some caution and test it out on a few devices before rolling it out to the entire farm.

We have tested Braiins OS+ thoroughly on our own miners with good results and external testers have had good results so far as well, but there’s simply no replacement for seeing it run smoothly on thousands of devices. We’ll update the community again once we have enough data to confidently remove the “beta” label.

0% Pool Fees on Braiins Pool

From now on, all Braiins OS+ users (including those mining with S9s) will receive 0% fees when mining on Braiins Pool.

Note that have some other changes planned for the pool, including implementing a block-by-block rebate structure so that full payouts happen as blocks are found rather than having a monthly pool fee rebate. We’ll provide a full overview of these changes soon, but for now here’s a sneak peak.

Launching the Braiins Partner Program

With this release, we are also launching the new Braiins Partner Program (BPP). If you share Braiins OS+ with large miners (50 PH/s of hashrate or more) in your network, you’ll earn a referral bonus in the form of a devfee split on the hashrate you bring to Braiins OS+.

The BPP enables us to focus on what we love to do, engineering, without limiting the growth of Braiins OS+ (and other Braiins products). Partners can help us reach new miners around the world who aren’t already in our network and get compensated for it directly, making this a mutually beneficial opportunity.

To learn more, check out the BPP page on the website.

Next in the Development Pipeline

There are some small known issues in the current release which we will work on fixing as quickly as possible. These include:

Inaccurate power consumption estimate for the S17 and S17 Pro which is lower than the actual power consumption based on our measurements in testing.
BOSminer stops running on S17s and S17 Pros when it detects a dead hashboard.
BOSminer is slow to reconnect to pools whenever a user’s IP address is changed by their internet service provider.

Beyond these fixes, we will continue our development to support other hardware models in the S17 family (S17+, T17, T17+), the next of which we plan to support being the S17+. MicroBT Whatsminers are in the pipeline as well, but a public release is further away.

Other small things in the pipeline include an SSH unlocker for the Antminer S9, adding a display of the “Last error” in the web interface, and continuously tweaking the autotuning algorithm to look for better and better efficiency.

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