Mining Ethereum on Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver with Multiple NVIDIA CUDA GPUs draft

Mining Ethereum on Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver with Multiple NVIDIA CUDA GPUs




This blog will outline you everything you need to setup Ethereum mining hardware, operating system, software, and drivers using Ubuntu 18.04 and NVIDIA GPUs

1) Overview:

Mining Ethereum may not be profitable and is dependent on a few things outside of your control, the current price of Eth, and the current cost of electricity.  There are various mining calculators available for you to calculate your cost.  One thing to note, is that while writing this article mining for Eth is not cost effective, however that doesn't mean the price or Eth won't go up (or down) in the future.



2) What you need:

• SSD hard drive - (if you plan on running an Eth node you will need at least 500GB)
• Motherboard, I used a cheaper 1151 socket, make sure it has enough PCI express ports if you plan to use multiple GPUs
• CPU - speed is not important since mining will be done on the GPUs, I found a cheap socket 1151 Intel i3 CPU
• RAM - Only 4 GB is required since mining uses the Ram on the GPU. I used DDR4 2400, again because it was cheap.
• Power Supply - Wattage will depend how many GPUs you run.  I choose a high quality 1200 Watt PSU to run 6 GPUs, it ran a little hot, since I scaled down to 4 GPUs and it runs much cooler
• GPUs - This guide is only for NVIDIA GPUs as that is all I have experience with.  I choose to run the GTX 1060 cards due to cost and lower power consumption.  Since the Current Eth dag size in nearing 3GB I would recommend purchase 6GB or higher memory cards.
• GPU Risers - cables and cards that allow you to run your GPUs in the PCI express 1x, 4x, 8x, and 16x slots.  
• Case or Rig with Power button
• USB stick for the Ubuntu installer
  

3) Getting Started - setting up BIOS and installing OS:

•  Once your rig is assembled we can start configuring the BIOS to allow multiple GPUs on your system.
• Enable "VT-d"
• Enable "Above 4G Processing"
• Take note of the Display GPU slot, change it if you must.  If you keep getting blank screens on boot switch to a different card
• Depending on your mother board you may have to configure boot order, or other common configurations.  Usually everything these days is plug and play
• Make sure you have a plan to add your new rig to your local network
• On another computer download and create the Ubuntu 18.04 bootable USB, https://tutorials.ubuntu.com/tutorial/tutorial-create-a-usb-stick-on-ubuntu
• Follow this tutorial to complete the installation of Ubuntu 18.04, its a good idea to choose the option to download updates during install 
• Once installed make sure you run 'sudo apt update' after the first boot to assure you have the latest updates

4) NVIDIA Drivers Automated install

• Currently the Ubuntu Software & Updates app can install the correct NVIDIA drivers for you.  
• Open Software & Updates, and select the "Additional Drivers" tab
• You should see a list of available open source NVIDIA drivers, at the time of writing this article nvidia-driver-390 and nvidia-driver-396 are both available to be installed.  Both drivers will allow you to mine Eth however you will need the respective Cuda Toolkit, 9.0 nvidia-driver-390, or 9.2vidia-driver-396. We will go into further detail on Cuda toolkit install later in this article.
• Once selected click "apply changes" and wait for the drivers to be downloaded and installed.  Once the install is finished reboot the system.
• Verify that the NVIDA drivers have been installed by finding "NVIDIA X Server settings" application and open it to confirm it lists all the GPUs installed on your system.  If there are one or more GPUs missing there could problems with your BIOS config (see above), cables, risers, or even not enough power.  If all those things check out, try changing the order of the cards.

5) NVIDIA Drivers Manual install

•  If you want to manage the NVIDIA drivers yourself you can download the drivers directly from NVIDIA:
  https://www.nvidia.com/Download/driverResults.aspx/137276/en-us

6) CUDA Toolkit Install

•  Currently the Cuda Toolkit download site does not list Ubuntu 18.04 as an option, however I have confirmed that the 17.10 and 16.04 tool kits can be installed on Ubuntu 18.04
• 9.2 Download -
  https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-downloads?target_os=Linux&target_arch=x86_64&target_distro=Ubuntu&target_version=1710&target_type=runfilelocal
• 9.0 Download
  https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-90-download-archive?target_os=Linux&target_arch=x86_64&target_distro=Ubuntu&target_version=1704&target_type=runfilelocal

7) Download Eth-proxy (stratum) git repo and build executable

• This step is optional, however it has been shown that proxy mining is slightly more profitable than just straight pool mining
• Follow the instructions on this repo to install the Eth proxy
  https://github.com/Atrides/eth-proxy

8) Download the Ethereum mining / ethminer git repo and build

•  Again this step is optional, you could just download the executable and run it on your system, however I've had more success avoiding mining errors building from source.
• https://github.com/ethereum-mining/ethminer

9) Putting it all Together