Apologies for starting new thread, but cannot resolve issue from any other info I've seen in other threads.

I'm running Linux Mint 13 (based on Ubuntu 12.04); Radeon driver 13.1 (most recent and final version to support the 4850).

I've used BOINC on Windows machines for several years, so am familiar with the normal settings. This is the first time I've tried getting it to work under Linux using an AMD GPU (have previously run successfully in Linux using nVidia).

I've tried installing the AMD SDK; I've installed BOINC v. 7.0.60 (per a recommendation in another thread), but absolutely nothing I've tried gets the BOINC manager to even recognize my GPU.

Recommendations greatly appreciated.

Apologies for starting new thread, but cannot resolve issue from any other info I've seen in other threads.

I'm running Linux Mint 13 (based on Ubuntu 12.04); Radeon driver 13.1 (most recent and final version to support the 4850).

I've used BOINC on Windows machines for several years, so am familiar with the normal settings. This is the first time I've tried getting it to work under Linux using an AMD GPU (have previously run successfully in Linux using nVidia).

I've tried installing the AMD SDK; I've installed BOINC v. 7.0.60 (per a recommendation in another thread), but absolutely nothing I've tried gets the BOINC manager to even recognize my GPU.

Recommendations greatly appreciated.

I am NOT a Linux expert but you need to install the 'proprietary drivers', try this link:\http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1131430

Thanks for the reply -- yup, already got the proprietary drivers installed (version 13.1). ;)

Well one other problem is I don't think you can go as high as a 13.x version driver for a 4000 series Radeon and get OCL support, regardless of OS.

Try something based on a Cat 12 build. I have a 4850 on Win7 and am using 12.8, IIRC.

Shodan7,

I know a little bit about Linux Ubuntu. Maybe I can help.

How did you install the AMD drivers? What command did you use if you installed from a terminal session?

To find out what hardware is installed, in a terminal session type "lspci | grep VGA" and see what you get back.

If the AMD drivers are installed properly, you should be able to type in a terminal session:

sudo aticonfig --initial

This will initially configure the AMD driver.

Then type:

sudo aticonfig --adapter=0 --od-getclocks

This will tell you what percent of gpu is being utilized.

Then type:

sudo aticonfig --odgt

This will tell you the temperature of the gpu.

Next question, how did you install BOINC? If you installed BOINC from the O/S software installer (synaptic?), it probably starts up BOINC as soon as the system comes up. If so, it could be starting before the AMD drivers have time to load. If that is the problem, the BOINC startup needs to be delayed for a few seconds while the GPU drivers have time to load. Here are some instructions on how to do that http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/viewthread_thread,34880_offset,0#416287

Hope that helps, let us know how it goes.

Shodan,

I'm running Mint 14 and 15 on my machines but with Nvidia cards. See if this helps.

1. Before you even start up the Boinc client, open the terminal window and type:

sudo service boinc-client restart

It may take a few seconds but then you should get 3 status lines all ending in "OK"

Then close the terminal and start your Boinc client and look under the event log tab. One of the early entries will tell you if your graphics cards are being seen.

Also, in the cc_config.xml after <options> be sure to add
<use_all_gpus>1</use_all_gpus>

Hope that helps.

Regards,
Steve

Thanks for the suggestions!

I tried the sudo service boinc-client restart idea, and it did not return any mention of graphics cards. But I know for sure that the Radeon 13.1 driver is installed, because I get excellent 3D performance in other applications. That tells me that it is in all likelihood the driver.

I will try rolling back to 12.6 as captainjack mentioned -- seems that version has worked for others in the past for others.

Shodan,

I'm running Mint 14 and 15 on my machines but with Nvidia cards. See if this helps.

1. Before you even start up the Boinc client, open the terminal window and type:

sudo service boinc-client restart

It may take a few seconds but then you should get 3 status lines all ending in "OK"

Then close the terminal and start your Boinc client and look under the event log tab. One of the early entries will tell you if your graphics cards are being seen.

Also, in the cc_config.xml after <options> be sure to add
<use_all_gpus>1</use_all_gpus>

Hope that helps.

Regards,
Steve

Ah ha! So, I've got some progress here. I reinstalled the 12.6 drivers (what a pain!), and I can confirm that they're working. When I looked in the event log tab as Steve suggested, I've found this:

ATI GPU 0: ATI Radeon HD 4700/4800 (RV740/RV770) (CAL version 1.4.1734, 512MB, 394MB available, 50 GFLOPS peak)
App version needs OpenCL but GPU doesn't support it
Application uses missting ATI GPU

So, I now know that BOINC sees the card -- what I don't understand is the "missing OpenCL" part; my card is a 4850, which should be supported. Do the above error messages make sense to anybody?

Depending on how you loaded the GPU drivers, you may also need to install the SDK (software developer kit) which includes OpenCL support. Here's a link:

http://developer.amd.com/tools-and-sdks/heterogeneous-computing/amd-accelerated-parallel-processing-app-sdk/downloads/

That solved it! Installing the OpenCL SDK v2.7 did the trick.

My Radeon HD 4850 is now crunching away. It's only been about 2 minutes, and it's already nearly done with a work unit. Amazing.

Thank you to everybody for the great support!

Hmmm...

That's interesting. I didn't think the 2.7 SDK would work on a 4000 series, or at least not 'officially'. ;-)

Hmmm...

That's interesting. I didn't think the 2.7 SDK would work on a 4000 series, or at least not 'officially'. ;-)

While I didn't do anything to the SDK package, I did use a different way of installing the "legacy" radeon drivers. I tried for hours to purge the previous radeon drivers I had installed (which was successful I think), but no matter what, I could not correctly install any version of ATI's proprietary drivers after uninstalling 13.1. So I went here:
http://www.ubuntuvibes.com/2012/10/how-to-install-amd-catalyst-legacy.html
And somebody apparently made a custom repository and packages to help folks like me with the older Radeon cards. After the ATI drivers were installed and working, I installed SDK 2.7 exactly as directed in the "readme" file.

Shodan,

Yep, that's the thing about pain.....it feels so good when it stops!! :)

Regards,
Steve

... I didn't think the 2.7 SDK would work on a 4000 series, or at least not 'officially'. ;-)

I came across this thread recently while doing a bit of googling for things like catalyst drivers for Linux, OpenCL runtime and AMD APP SDK, HD4850, etc. I have 12 hosts with 4850s running Win XP. I'm doing Einstein on the CPUs and MW on the GPUs.

These 12 hosts are pretty much the last Win XP machines I have as all my Einstein hosts run Linux (PCLinuxOS). The bulk were converted in 2007-2009 period. I started MW GPU in early 2009 and Win XP was the logical choice for the OS back then. The 12 GPU hosts have run pretty much continuously since the start. They crash occasionally and several have shown signs of overheating but I clean the CPU and GPU fans when needed. Usually that fixes things but on several now I've had to re-grease the GPU heat sink in order to get the temperature back to normal. All-in-all they soldier on with minimal interference from me so there hasn't been any great urge to change the OS.

That all changed recently when the hard disk failed on one of them. I didn't relish the prospect of reinstalling XP so I decided it was the perfect time to transition all of them to Linux, with the failed hard drive host being the test machine. I read a lot of stuff at various places, but this thread was the clincher - the proof that it should be quite easy to do. Many thanks in particular to Shodan7 and captainjack for their valuable comments. The information they shared made the whole exercise a snap.

The failed drive wasn't being recognised by the BIOS so I had the thought that it mightn't be mechanical failure but rather a failure of the interface electronics. The drive is a Seagate ST320014A - 20GB IDE. I got a lot of these drives in 2007 in a bunch of P3 machines I bought very cheaply at auction. They would have been around 5 years old then so more than 10 years now. They have been surprisingly reliable - very few failures while I've owned them. So, before throwing it away, I decided to try swapping the interface board from a known good ST320014A. When I powered up, the drive was immediately recognised, Windows booted normally and crunching recommenced. You get lucky sometimes :-). However, my mind was made up. I was going to transition this machine to Linux - period!

All I had to do was put this refurbished drive aside (just in case) and install the latest PCLinuxOS on a replacement. I use a live USB HD image for installation so it's very quick compared to optical media. I also keep a fully updated copy of the PCLinuxOS repository on the same disk so immediately after the install I can update all packages and add any new ones required. Magically quick, compared to the internet. On my LAN, I have a machine that acts as a Samba file server so I never have to actually 'install' BOINC or download any apps, data files, etc. I keep 'templates' of everything which I just retrieve from the Samba share. So I just choose the BOINC version template I want to use, add the account xml files for the projects, add the required project directories with all their data files and apps and edit the state file template to give the new host its identity. In this case, I wanted the new host to have the same identity as the Win XP host it was replacing - for both MWAH and EAH. This is quite easy to do with a few key edits in the state file template.

After setting up all the BOINC and project files, confirming that the Catalyst 13.1 proprietary driver (fglrx-legacy for HD4850 and older) was installed, I downloaded the 2.7 version of the AMD APP SDK from the AMD website. I unpacked the tar file and ran the install shell script and it did its thing and reported success with no error messages.

The last thing was to reboot the machine and then with fingers crossed, launch BOINC. I was pleasantly surprised when I was able to download new tasks and start crunching them with no issues. So I can indeed confirm that the 2.7 SDK is fine for crunching on a HD4850 here at MWAH. I can't use these GPUs at EAH so I'm very happy they continue to be useful here.

I was happy to see tasks being returned and validated. The crunch times were slightly longer than for winXP (120secs compared to 115secs). Then I remembered that the core frequency had been pushed up to 700MHz under Windows. So I tried 'aticonfig --help' and found all the options needed to enable overdrive, to read and set the clocks, and to commit the new values for posterity. So the card is now running at 700MHz (the highest allowed) for core and 750MHz (the lowest allowed) for memory. I remember the discussions years ago that memory clock frequency should be set as low as possible (to reduce heat) without affecting crunch time. I'd like to set it a lot less than 750MHz.

So once again, many thanks to Shodan7 for the notes on how he achieved it and to captainjack for pointing out the aticonfig options. If anybody is interested in the host details, its hostID is 108757 and if you drill down to dates/times around 26 July 7:00 AM UTC you will see the last task crunched under WinXP and a few hours later, the first task crunched under Linux. An hour or two later you will also see the reduction in crunch time when I overclocked the core frequency. All I had to do (as root) was

# aticonfig --od-enable      (to enable overdrive)
# aticonfig --od-getclocks   (to see the default clocks [625,933] and the allowed limits)
# aticonfig --od-setclocks=700,750 (to set the new frequencies)
# aticonfig --od-commitclocks      (to save for posterity)
# aticonfig --od-gettemperature    (to check the temperature after overclocking)

The value reported was 62deg C, which seems pleasantly low when compared to what was reported in Catalyst control center under Win XP (70-80deg C if I remember correctly). As I write this, crunching under Linux has been in progress for over 12 hours with no tasks reporting as errors. Now, 11 more hosts to go! :-).

---

Cheers,
Gary.

Thanks, Gary! That really made my day – so glad to know that you're continuing to crunch away on the 4850s with Linux.

And thank you also for the advice on OC'ing the 4850. I just bumped up to 700, 750. More power to MilkyWay!

Best regards,
John

p.s. 1,000,000,000+ credits!!! – wow

Thanks, Gary! That really made my day – so glad to know that you're continuing to crunch away on the 4850s with Linux.

You're most welcome. When people post useful experiences, they deserve to be told how useful it was and to be given thanks accordingly.

And thank you also for the advice on OC'ing the 4850. I just bumped up to 700, 750. More power to MilkyWay!

I've done the transition to 3 hosts so far without problem and #4 will be ready to go very shortly. I'm running down existing caches rather than trashing any tasks. That's quick to do with MWAH but takes longer for EAH. So I've adopted the strategy of suspending the unstarted EAH tasks and just waiting for the running tasks to finish. After reporting, and stopping BOINC, I can then remove the unstarted tasks by editing the state file. This way, upon restarting under Linux, the scheduler at EAH will notice the missing tasks, mark them as 'lost' and resend them to me, fully prepped to be crunched under Linux. Works a treat!

With regards to changing frequencies for the 4850, I've discovered that you can go lower than the lower limit of the 'allowed range'. So I tried setting the clocks to 700, 500 and it worked! It seems to give about 1-2 deg C reduction in temperature from the value reported for 700, 750, although I haven't yet tested things thoroughly enough to be certain it's real. 700, 500 seems to give no observable change in the crunch time so I'll try 700, 300 on the next host and see how that goes.

p.s. 1,000,000,000+ credits!!! – wow

Thanks!

12 4850s crunching for over 4 years should achieve something, I guess :-).

---

Cheers,
Gary.

Thanks to all of you, I had the same problem for my HD4850 on Debian Wheezy.

I first installed AMD APP SDK 2.8 but it didn't work, so I simply installed the 2.7 version and now it works, my GPU is crunching !

Regards,
Gorgias.