xmrig
Quick question about MSR and running xmrig without superuser
I use xmrig on my personal computer (Intel i7-6500U), and I'd rather not run it as root because I also need to give it access to networking in order to pool mine.
Apparently the MSR optimization is auto-configured when xmrig is run as root. That does work for me. I just wanted to confirm that xmrig doesn't need su for rdmsr access, and that doing wrmsr -a 0x1a4 0xf myself will also activate the MSR optimization, because xmrig will still print scary cannot read MSR 0x000001a4 and FAILED TO APPLY MSR MOD, HASHRATE WILL BE LOW messages because it can't read the MSR itself.
If so, perhaps the error message specifically for rdmsr() failures should be changed to something different like "cannot check MSR mod, your hashrate may be low" and "confirm that the MSR mod is activated by running 'rdmsr $address' : it should return $value".
If you use wrmsr yourself by hand it should work since xmrig doesn't have perms to even touch MSR then. Also the reason I think for not allowing reading of MSRs unless root is to stop side channel attacks.
The assumption is if you are power-user enough to set the MSRs yourself, you will also be power-user enough to know the error message is lying.
