On Friday I installed BOINC 7.2.42 on my host 7057115, not so much by choice but because I'd had to install fresh copies of everything on that machine due to a hard drive failure the previous Sunday night.

In the process of trying to research a problem that cropped up, with some AP tasks continuing to run when BOINC was shut down (and which I'll probably discuss in a new thread when I can get to it), I discovered that the Event Log in 7.2.42 seems to have done away with several pieces of very useful information. In 7.2.33, when a new task started, the log would show an entry similar to:

Starting task 17my13aa.23116.13155.438086664205.12.31_1 using setiathome_v7 version 700 (cuda42) in slot 1

In 7.2.42, the application and slot info have disappeared, leaving an entry looking like this:

Starting task 20my13ab.6061.3441.438086664200.12.14_1

On a machine that's only running one task at a time, like my old ThnikPad laptop, I suppose that's perfectly adequate. But on my T7400, which is usually running as many as 17 tasks at a time, trying to identify and follow task activity in the Event Log can be a real pain without that application and slot data. I also noticed that there were no entries in the log for task restarts, which also increases the difficulty of tracking task behavior. There might be other differences that I haven't been impacted by yet.

Does anybody know if these are intentional omissions by the BOINC developers, or if perhaps there's some new option that I need to set to turn this data back on? Under the circumstances, I'm not likely to upgrade my other machines to 7.2.42, and will probably see if I can downgrade on my T7400.

Which version were you used to using?

I don't think any information has been removed entirely, but there has been a tendency - starting quite a long time ago - to move the more detailed stuff into debug categories that aren't shown by default. For example:

24/03/2014 18:41:42 | SETI@home | [cpu_sched] Starting task 20au13ac.21529.18472.438086664199.12.106_1 using setiathome_v7 version 700 (cuda42) in slot 2

24/03/2014 18:51:54 | SETI@home | Requesting new tasks for NVIDIA
24/03/2014 18:51:54 | SETI@home | [sched_op] CPU work request: 0.00 seconds; 0.00 devices
24/03/2014 18:51:54 | SETI@home | [sched_op] NVIDIA work request: 4315.30 seconds; 0.00 devices
24/03/2014 18:51:56 | SETI@home | Scheduler request completed: got 3 new tasks
24/03/2014 18:51:56 | SETI@home | [sched_op] estimated total CPU task duration: 0 seconds
24/03/2014 18:51:56 | SETI@home | [sched_op] estimated total NVIDIA task duration: 4402 seconds
24/03/2014 18:51:56 | SETI@home | [sched_op] handle_scheduler_reply(): got ack for task 20au13ac.21529.18472.438086664199.12.1_0

Those two are activated by

<cpu_sched>1</cpu_sched>
<sched_op_debug>1</sched_op_debug>

respectively. I find them both sufficiently informative to be useful, without supplying such an overwhelming volume of data that the log file becomes useless.

Which version were you used to using?

All my other machines are on 7.2.33, so this seems to be a sudden change. Looks like that <cpu_sched>1</cpu_sched> might be what I need to get the app and slot info back. I'll try it this evening when my T7400 comes back up. (It's slways shut down on weekday afternoons.)

The <cpu_sched>1</cpu_sched> log flag does the trick. I added it to cc_config this evening and the "Starting task" and "Restarting task" log entries pretty much reverted to their behavior in pre-7.2.42 BOINC, just with "[cpu_sched]" added to each message. Thanks for the help, Richard.