Miner application discovery

How Crossbelt discovers miner applications.

Summary

One of the unique features of Crossbelt is that it discovers the mining application being used. This is a key difference because it means you can install Crossbelt anywhere and it will find the running mining application without any kind of prior setup.

Not only does Crossbelt find the mining application it will also discover the API port in which it exports stats to. This is especially important because we know you don’t want to configure any special config file with with a list of ports for each miner. So Crossbelt just discovers it for you. Feel free to change the port at any time and Crossbelt will keep finding it.

Discovery technology

Crossbelt discovers the miner application and API port with the following workflow:

  1. Is the last found miner application still being used?
  2. Of the list of supported mining applications are any of them currently running?
  3. Which ports does the miner application have open?
  4. Which port is the API port?
  5. Does the miner even have an API, where are the logs sent?

It does all of this in about one second.

Alternative methods

Because Crossbelt does not support every miner application and version at this time we also fallback to some operating system methods to get data as well. For ethos this means we just parse the same files ethos uses. This allows us to show mining data for any miner that Crossbelt does not support.

Unsupported Miners

As time goes on we will continue to add support for new miners, right now we just support the major miner applications.