A few weeks ago Bitmain released a new firmware for its Antminer S9 ASICs to support AsicBoost that gives Antminer S9 a boost of approximately 20% in hashrate. Meaning that all owners of Antminer S9 ASICs that want to boost their mining machines need to update the firmware on their ASIC.
For most miners, upgrading the firmware is a really painful experience - especially since after the firmware upgrade they also need to upgrade all other software they are using for remote monitoring (such as ASIC Hub). Doing it on multiple ASICs can take quite some time.
That’s why we decided to give you all a quick and neat way to upgrade the firmware on your Antminers.
ASIC Hub
To use this solution, you will need to have ASIC Hub installed on your Antminer:
- You won’t need an additional computer that is running in the same local network as your Antminers.
- You will be faster and more flexible as the connection goes directly from ASIC to your minerstat dashboard, without an intermediary (ASIC node).
- You will be able to execute updates (such as this bulk firmware update) faster than anywhere else.
You can find instructions for setting up ASIC Hub on our GitHub or read the tutorial for Antminer monitoring. However, if you have already upgraded your firmware to the latest’s Antminer version and it doesn’t allow SSH access anymore, you will need to check out ASIC Hub (Non-SSH).
Antminer S9 Bulk Firmware Update
After you are running on ASIC Hub, there is only one command you need to execute:
cd /tmp && wget -O firmware.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/minerstat/minerstat-asic-hub/master/bulk-firmware.sh && chmod 777 *.sh && sh firmware.shWait for it to finish and voila. Your Antminers are upgraded with the new firmware. You don’t need to do anything else as the script you run updated the ASIC Hub for you as well.
Disclaimer
Not all SHA-256 pools support AsicBoost - before you connect your rigs to a pool, make sure to check if they do support this upgrade. If you are mining on NiceHash be careful to connect to the right stratum, as they are using an independent algorithm called SHA-256 AsicBoost for mining with S9 with AsicBoost upgrade (so mining directly to SHA-256 won’t work).
Happy mining!
Want to start monitoring your ASIC operation? Join minerstat and register a new account now.
