[AMD A4-5300] boinc fails to detect GPU

[Ken Sharp]

BOINC fails to detect the GPU of the AMD A4-5300 APU.

With the OpenCL drivers and the latest AMD SDK installed it detects the CPU as OpenCL-capable, but not the GPU.

04-Jan-2015 15:26:43 [---] [coproc] launching child process at /usr/bin/boinc
04-Jan-2015 15:26:43 [---] [coproc] relative to directory /var/lib/boinc-client
04-Jan-2015 15:26:43 [---] [coproc] with data directory /var/lib/boinc-client
04-Jan-2015 15:26:43 [---] OpenCL CPU: AMD A4-5300 APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics (OpenCL driver vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., driver version 1642.5 (sse2,avx,fma4), device version OpenCL 1.2 AMD-APP (1642.5))
04-Jan-2015 15:26:43 [---] No NVIDIA library found
04-Jan-2015 15:26:43 [---] calInit() returned 1
04-Jan-2015 15:26:43 [---] No usable GPUs found

There are various articles on the BOINC forums, and the various projects' forums, all giving advice that doesn't help, but this should really work out of the box. I am unable to get this to work at all.

user:boinc is already part of group:video - video:x:44:boinc

Also tried with 7.4.23 from PPA https://launchpad.net/~costamagnagianfranco/+archive/ubuntu/boinc

ubuntu-bug refuses to report this.

[Gianfranco Costamagna (costamagnagianfranco)]

this seems to be an upstream issue, can you please report on boinc-dev?

[Ken Sharp (kennybobs)]

Okay, I screwed up the initial testing: in short, it all works when logged in as the current user.
(Note: do *not* enable SSH X forwarding when testing)

This PC automatically logs into an X session as user1. Remember: user1 is logged in before boinc starts.

1. sudo service boinc-client stop
2. Change BOINC_USER=boinc to BOINC_USER=user1 in /etc/default/boinc (some parts of the init script can be cleaned up too)
3. Add "sleep 10" to startup() in /etc/init.d/boinc-client to allow the user to log in (needed)
4. sudo chown -R user1: /etc/boinc-client/*
5. sudo chown -R user1: /var/lib/boinc-client
6. sudo service boinc-client start

05-Jan-2015 13:10:56 [---] CAL: ATI GPU 0: AMD Radeon HD 7400/7500/8300/8400 series (Scrapper) (CAL version 1.4.1848, 768MB, 648MB available, 463 GFLOPS peak)
05-Jan-2015 13:10:56 [---] OpenCL: AMD/ATI GPU 0: AMD Radeon HD 7400/7500/8300/8400 series (Scrapper) (driver version 1642.5 (VM), device version OpenCL 1.2 AMD-APP (1642.5), 768MB, 648MB available, 463 GFLOPS peak)
05-Jan-2015 13:10:56 [---] OpenCL CPU: AMD A4-5300 APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics (OpenCL driver vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., driver version 1642.5 (sse2,avx,fma4), device version OpenCL 1.2 AMD-APP (1642.5))

Downloading directly from BOINC and running as user1 works out of the box.

So there are permission problems in the BOINC packages (in Trusty at least) that will not allow the GPU to be detected. The line "xhost local:boinc" is not enough to grant user:boinc access to the GPU.

This thread talks about some workarounds, but this really needs to be fixed (if possible):
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=6307

I don't think this is an upstream issue: I think it needs to be fixed this end.

[Gianfranco Costamagna (costamagnagianfranco)]

Hello, I think we finally got it work, let me know if I missed something, and please try 7.8.1 in my ppa

https://launchpad.net/~costamagnagianfranco/+archive/ubuntu/boinc/

[Ken Sharp (kennybobs)]

Over ssh -X:

$ sudo apt install --reinstall boinc-client
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
0 to upgrade, 0 to newly install, 1 reinstalled, 0 to remove and 0 not to upgrade.
Need to get 2,023 kB of archives.
After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://ppa.launchpad.net/costamagnagianfranco/boinc/ubuntu/ trusty/main boinc-client amd64 7.9.3+dfsg-1~ubuntu14.04.1~ppa2 [2,023 kB]
Fetched 2,023 kB in 1s (1,613 kB/s)
Preconfiguring packages ...
(Reading database ... 353279 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../boinc-client_7.9.3+dfsg-1~ubuntu14.04.1~ppa2_amd64.deb ...
 * Stopping BOINC core client: boinc ... waiting [ OK ]
Unpacking boinc-client (7.9.3+dfsg-1~ubuntu14.04.1~ppa2) over (7.9.3+dfsg-1~ubuntu14.04.1~ppa2) ...
Processing triggers for ureadahead (0.100.0-16) ...
ureadahead will be reprofiled on next reboot
Processing triggers for man-db (2.6.7.1-1ubuntu1) ...
Setting up boinc-client (7.9.3+dfsg-1~ubuntu14.04.1~ppa2) ...
usermod: group 'input' does not exist
Could not assign boinc user to group 'input'.
 * Starting BOINC core client: boinc localuser:boinc being added to access control list
xhost: must be on local machine to add or remove hosts.
                                                                                                                                                        [ OK ]
 * Setting up scheduling for BOINC core client and children: chrt: failed to set pid 19937's policy: No such process
chrt: failed to set pid 19937's policy: No such process
chrt: failed to set pid 19937's policy: No such process
Could not adjust oom_score of task

After setting DISPLAY=:0 (the active X server):

$ sudo apt install --reinstall boinc-client
[sudo] password for ken:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
0 to upgrade, 0 to newly install, 1 reinstalled, 0 to remove and 0 not to upgrade.
Need to get 0 B/2,023 kB of archives.
After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used.
Preconfiguring packages ...
(Reading database ... 353279 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../boinc-client_7.9.3+dfsg-1~ubuntu14.04.1~ppa2_amd64.deb ...
 * Stopping BOINC core client: boinc ... waiting [ OK ]
Unpacking boinc-client (7.9.3+dfsg-1~ubuntu14.04.1~ppa2) over (7.9.3+dfsg-1~ubuntu14.04.1~ppa...