This weekend, I decided to look into crypto currencies again.  Three years ago, I poked around bitcoin and managed to find a site that would give you 1/1000th of a bitcoin for free, just to get people to use the currency.  Now, there are lots of new currencies online and who knows which will become as popular as Bitcoin, although I expect some of them will make it.  I, personally, like the vibe of Dogecoin, which has a level of seriousness I find appropriate for currencies anyway.

I set about trying to mine some on Fedora 20.  I am the sort of Linux user who tolerates very little non-free code on the machine and graphics-related topics especially give me pause.  It seemed worthwhile to me to figure out how to get a miner running on the open-source drivers, then.  I was happy to find that Tom Stellard, a mesa developer, posted on his blog about getting mining working with the open radeon drivers.

The trick, it turns out, was getting a new enough version of mesa, clang, and LLVM to get things working.  I ended up having to install fedora-release-rawhide and then running

sudo yum install mesa mesa-libOpenCL clang llvm --enablerepo=rawhide

to get the appropriate bits.

Now I'm chugging away at ~160Mhashes/s, which seems to be pretty slow by modern standards, but within a factor of 2 of what other people report for my card.  Not bad for new code.

If you find this useful, feel free to throw some of your shiny, new crypto-currency at me!  Maybe then I'll be able to get hardware I can actually play this strange lottery with!

BTC: 1QKPMpRNEbpwhzzP33HpiNSEfEgDdTYvd3

DOGE: D5A9ngH7mb3roJgpAGUjUPdAcbV3svvkvH