After a reboot the RX570 appeared in BOINC ready to work.

Are you sure? Did you see the printout of usable detected OpenCL drivers in the Event Log after BOINC startup?

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

except i added the openCL pal too, since i intend to upgrade later

Believe that was a mistake as I don't think the PAL drivers can do compute. Only install the legacy drivers.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

Did you uninstall the Repository driver First, before installing the AMD driver? I didn't even bother installing the Repository driver since I knew it wouldn't work anyway. What does Additional Drivers say for installed drivers? You might try changing Additional Drivers back to Using X.Org X server - Nouveau... if possible, and reinstall the AMD driver again. By installing both OpenCL drivers you are tempting Murphy's Law by assuming the correct OpenCL driver will be used. Never tempt Murphy's law.

After a reboot the RX570 appeared in BOINC ready to work.

Are you sure? Did you see the printout of usable detected OpenCL drivers in the Event Log after BOINC startup?

The machine ran for days, it certainly looked as though it was working to me, https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/results.php?hostid=8316299 I haven't run it since WOW.

The machine ran for days, it certainly looked as though it was working to me, https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/results.php?hostid=8316299 I haven't run it since WOW.

I was replying to Fizz and asking him those questions. See the mention of the RX570 was a quote from you in his reply. Nevermind.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

That is expected since you haven't installed any recognizable OpenCL drivers yet. The Mesa drivers aren't compatible with compute on almost every BOINC project. You need to get the legacy OpenCL drivers for your card.

[Edit] Or you haven't rebooted the computer yet. Graphics drivers are compiled into the Linux kernel and are not usable until you restart the computer to load the newly compiled kernel.

Yep, i did do the reboot.

I thought Mesa was an independent thing... It certainly looks that way in the install description, not conflicting. So you're saying i would have to install in headless mode? Because every other implementation includes Mesa. But headless also means no OpenGL, accelerated graphics, or Vulkan. Just base kernel plus OpenCL.

I've been doing the install primarily from this source, (which i found with a redirect from AMD's own support pages):
https://amdgpu-install.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

-Fizz

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Did you uninstall the Repository driver First, before installing the AMD driver? I didn't even bother installing the Repository driver since I knew it wouldn't work anyway. What does Additional Drivers say for installed drivers? You might try changing Additional Drivers back to Using X.Org X server - Nouveau... if possible, and reinstall the AMD driver again. By installing both OpenCL drivers you are tempting Murphy's Law by assuming the correct OpenCL driver will be used. Never tempt Murphy's law.

No, to uninstall repository drivers. My system had whatever drivers were already in the 4.15 kernel. And it gave pretty good performance in benchmark tests. So the graphics acceleration seems to be working. But I was following the instructions (see previous message), and it made no mention of uninstalling. How would i do so?

There are no addition installed drivers shown. Additional Drivers has always been entirely blank for me, ever since i got the OS up and running.

So is there a way to query what driver version is being used? Or is inxi -G the best way to do that?


-Fizz

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Well, I broke down and installed the 570 into another machine, and since the machine was setup to run nVidia GPUs I also installed a new system. This is what the inxi -G shows after a new install and after installing the driver;
inxi -G
Graphics: Card: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Ellesmere [Radeon RX 470/480/570/570X/580/580X]
Display Server: x11 (X.Org 1.20.4 ) driver: amdgpu
Resolution: 1920x1080@60.00hz
OpenGL: renderer: Radeon RX 570 Series (POLARIS10, DRM 3.27.0, 5.0.0-27-generic, LLVM 8.0.0)
version: 4.5 Mesa 19.0.8

inxi -G
Graphics: Card: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Ellesmere [Radeon RX 470/480/570/570X/580/580X]
Display Server: x11 (X.Org 1.20.4 ) driver: amdgpu
Resolution: 1920x1080@60.00hz
OpenGL: renderer: Radeon RX 570 Series version: 4.6.13572 5.0.73

It appears you don't have an AMD Pro driver installed. Perhaps it had something to do with moving those installer files around before installing? I'd do as I suggested before, reinstall the driver and this time don't move anything before you install it. I checked Additional Drivers and it stays blank before and after installation. The best way to see what is installed is to use the Package Manager and search for certain names. I think Mint also uses Synaptic, install it by running sudo apt install synaptic. Then launch it and search for AMD. Before installing the driver you will have to scroll near the bottom to see any AMD video drivers installed. After installation you should see dozens of packages installed, many with the number 19.30.

So, it worked pretty much as before, download the driver and expand it, cd to the driver folder, and install it using sudo ./amdgpu-pro-install --opencl=legacy. Then Reboot. You can see the new results in the same location, this time it's only running One task at a time, https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/results.php?hostid=8316299
I really miss the CCC control panel, and I can't seem to find a replacement.

The Mesa (OpenCL component) drivers aren't compatible with compute on almost every BOINC project. You need to get the legacy OpenCL drivers for your card.

No I'm saying the OpenCL component of the Mesa drivers are not compute compatible with most BOINC projects. Only the legacy drivers contain a compatible OpenCL component.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

OK, i think it's installed now. No idea why the previous time didn't work. The two things i did differently: i'm now on 5.0 kernel, rather than 4.15, and i went for just the legacy install instead of pal.

I've done a couple benchmarks, using Unigine's Heaven and Superposition. Interestingly, Heaven performs a bit better, but Superposition is a lot worse.

So, reading up on it, it seems that the open drivers are actually better for gaming and 3d apps than the pro drivers. So i uninstalled the pro drivers, installed the latest open drivers, and then did the headless install to get openCL.

And all that seems to have gone well. clinfo gives me the following info (with a lot of others, but this looked odd):

Platform Version OpenCL 2.1 AMD-APP (2906.7)
and later
Device OpenCL C Version OpenCL C 1.2

So one line says OpenCL 2.1, and the other 1.2. Not a typo on my part.

More importantly, i can't tell if Boinc / Seti@Home is making use of it or not. The gpu doesn't show up in my device list, at least not yet. Is there anything more i need to do to get it working with Seti@Home / Boinc?


-Fizz

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Have you restarted BOINC? The output from clinfo looks correct. BOINC does not yet show detected OpenCL drivers. After BOINC restart at the beginning of the Event Log, the client will print out the detected gpu cards and the drivers installed which will show on your account computers page.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

Well, the service starts in the background automatically. Or were you referring to the Boinc Manager? I had not opened up the Boinc Manager at all. I just started the Manager now, but i'm not sure what i'm looking for to refresh it.

-Fizz

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You can look at the Event Log without using the Manager. The BOINC directory contains a file named stdoutdae.txt which is the event log of the startup of the client and everything else the client does.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

You are looking for the client to detect the gpu with the CUDA and OpenCL drivers detected at startup.

16-Sep-2019 16:13:03 [---] CUDA: NVIDIA GPU 0: GeForce RTX 2080 (driver version 435.21, CUDA version unknown, compute capability 7.5, 4096MB, 3966MB available, 10598 GFLOPS peak)
16-Sep-2019 16:13:03 [---] OpenCL: NVIDIA GPU 0: GeForce RTX 2080 (driver version 435.21, device version OpenCL 1.2 CUDA, 7982MB, 7982MB available, 10598 GFLOPS peak)

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

BOINC will only work with the Pro driver downloaded from AMD. It will not work with the Open Source driver. So, if you must use the Open Source driver, the only alternative is to have Two Systems , one for BOINC and one for whatever you need the other driver for.

...So i uninstalled the pro drivers, installed the latest open drivers, and then did the headless install to get openCL.......The gpu doesn't show up in my device list, at least not yet. Is there anything more i need to do to get it working with Seti@Home / Boinc?
-Fizz

BOINC will only work with the Pro driver downloaded from AMD. It will not work with the Open Source driver. So, if you must use the Open Source driver, the only alternative is to have Two Systems , one for BOINC and one for whatever you need the other driver for.

But OpenCL comes from the Pro driver only. I ran ./amdgpu-pro-install --opencl=legacy --headless
And per their website, that installs the base kernel and Pro OpenCL. It does not touch the Accelerated graphics, Mesa multimedia, Pro OpenGL, or Pro Vulkan.

So if Boinc is needing OpenCL, i've given it OpenCL. For the record, the time i had the full pro drivers installed, Boinc still didn't detect it.

-Fizz

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You are looking for the client to detect the gpu with the CUDA and OpenCL drivers detected at startup.

16-Sep-2019 16:13:03 [---] CUDA: NVIDIA GPU 0: GeForce RTX 2080 (driver version 435.21, CUDA version unknown, compute capability 7.5, 4096MB, 3966MB available, 10598 GFLOPS peak)
16-Sep-2019 16:13:03 [---] OpenCL: NVIDIA GPU 0: GeForce RTX 2080 (driver version 435.21, device version OpenCL 1.2 CUDA, 7982MB, 7982MB available, 10598 GFLOPS peak)

But where would i find that output? Boinc / Seti auto-starts in the background. I never see it tell me anything.

-Fizz

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But where would i find that output? Boinc / Seti auto-starts in the background. I never see it tell me anything.

-Fizz

If you open the BOINC Manager application ('boincmgr'), there is an Event Log - Tools menu, or Ctrl+Shift+E. The example lines Keith quoted came from that.

BOINC will only work with the Pro driver downloaded from AMD. It will not work with the Open Source driver. So, if you must use the Open Source driver, the only alternative is to have Two Systems , one for BOINC and one for whatever you need the other driver for.

But OpenCL comes from the Pro driver only. I ran ./amdgpu-pro-install --opencl=legacy --headless
And per their website, that installs the base kernel and Pro OpenCL. It does not touch the Accelerated graphics, Mesa multimedia, Pro OpenGL, or Pro Vulkan.

So if Boinc is needing OpenCL, i've given it OpenCL. For the record, the time i had the full pro drivers installed, Boinc still didn't detect it.

-Fizz

Installing the Pro driver as explained earlier has worked on two different machines for me. First machine was switched from running the NV driver to AMD driver. Second machine was a fresh install of Ubuntu 18.04.3. As soon as the Pro driver was installed BOINC saw the RX570 and worked right away after a reboot. I did try the first machine with both NV and AMD drivers for hours with the results that the system/OS wouldn't boot as soon as I installed the other driver. You use to be able to run both NV & AMD drivers back with the old AMD fglrx drivers. Finally gave up and just used the AMD driver on the first machine, which worked great for the WOW finish.
If you install the Pro driver your computer page will look as though, Coprocessors: AMD Radeon RX 570 Series (3629MB) OpenCL: 1.2
BOINC startup will look as this;

Wed 18 Sep 2019 08:34:24 AM EDT | | Starting BOINC client version 7.14.2 for x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
Wed 18 Sep 2019 08:34:24 AM EDT | | log flags: file_xfer, sched_ops, task, sched_op_debug
Wed 18 Sep 2019 08:34:24 AM EDT | | Libraries: libcurl/7.58.0 GnuTLS/3.5.18 zlib/1.2.11 libidn2/2.0.4 libpsl/0.19.1 (+libidn2/2.0.4) nghttp2/1.30.0 librtmp/2.3
Wed 18 Sep 2019 08:34:24 AM EDT | | Data directory: /home/tbar/BOINC-6299
Wed 18 Sep 2019 08:34:30 AM EDT | | OpenCL: AMD/ATI GPU 0: Radeon RX 570 Series (driver version 2906.7, device version OpenCL 1.2 AMD-APP (2906.7), 3588MB, 3588MB available, 4669 GFLOPS peak)
Wed 18 Sep 2019 08:34:30 AM EDT | SETI@home | Found app_info.xml; using anonymous platform
Wed 18 Sep 2019 08:34:30 AM EDT | | [libc detection] gathered: 2.27, Ubuntu GLIBC 2.27-3ubuntu1
Wed 18 Sep 2019 08:34:30 AM EDT | | Processor: 4 GenuineIntel Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q9400 @ 2.66GHz [Family 6 Model 23 Stepping 10]
Wed 18 Sep 2019 08:34:30 AM EDT | | Processor features: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good nopl cpuid aperfmperf pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx smx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm sse4_1 xsave lahf_lm pti tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority dtherm
Wed 18 Sep 2019 08:34:30 AM EDT | | OS: Linux Ubuntu: Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS [5.0.0-27-generic|libc 2.27 (Ubuntu GLIBC 2.27-3ubuntu1)]

All it takes is to install the AMD Package from AMD, and make sure you Don't have Competing drivers installed. If it doesn't work you should probably install a fresh system.

If you open the BOINC Manager application ('boincmgr'), there is an Event Log - Tools menu, or Ctrl+Shift+E. The example lines Keith quoted came from that.

Ah, i see, thanks. Unfortunately, it says "no usable gpus found". It says this even with the full amdgpu-pro driver installed (gave that a try again based on TBar's message).

Is this possibly related to the Boinc version? I'm on 7.9.3.


-Fizz

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No. v7.9.3 was the version I started with under Linux Mint. Once I got working drivers installed (slightly different technique: I have NVidia GPUs), BOINC detected them just fine.

"no usable gpus found" is a valuable diagnostic which demonstrates that you haven't got the drivers installed properly yet - when you do, you will see messages similar to the examples Keith posted.