[Arch Linux] Very low PPD

[seatsea]

The other thing that might have fixed it was simply re-installing the system.

[Kebast]

Sorry, mine ended up just being a driver conflict issue. The newest driver seems to work fine now.

Please explain (for the rest of us).

I commented again a few posts down. I hadn't properly purged my old drivers.

[seatsea]

Seems like that was some false alert, I've started to fold a new WU and according to aticonfig, my GPU usages i back to bellow 20%. The WU is very slowly progressing but much to slowly. When it was working the usage was as expected 100%.
What is even wierder, is that when I check my CPU usage, the FAHCore that's supposed to be for the GPU is using 100% CPU time. Could it be that somehow FAH is using my CPU instead of my GPU?

[davidcoton]

Can you post two sections of log, one showing a WU after the last re-installation and running reasonable PPD, the other showing a slow WU on the latest install?

If you get Core17 or later, then they do run 100% on one CPU core. It's sitting polling for results from the GPU, so it looks busy but actually not doing much.

Is there a built-in GPU on your motherboard? Possibly FAH is confused about which GPU is which, and is running on the wrong one. There are ways of manually sorting out the indexing, if that could be the case someone may have the link to the topic handy.

[bruce]

When WUs do run successfully on the GPU, they almost always use 100% of a single CPU thread, too. If you fail to leave a free CPU to drive the GPU, performance will suffer. You can expect to see each task "FahCore_1*" using a full CPU.

What else is running on your CPUs?

[seatsea]

I've got a quad core CPU. Normally, I'm just using my browser or folding with 3 threads. But what is weird is that the WU was using 100% of all 4 cores even when I made sure nothing else was running, and my GPU was still very close to idling (never going over 20%when it's supposed to be folding)

[bruce]

If "top" shows FahCore_a*, it will be using many of your CPU cores and no GPUs. The GPU cores (anything between 11 and 21) need 100% of one core. [Remember in Linux, a Quad has a total of 400%, each CPU provides up to 100%]

[seatsea]

I was using KSysGuard to view the usage, and on that 100% is all of the cores.
When I use top, FahCore_17, the core that's being used for GPU folding, is using 350%, and the 4 cores of my CPU are running between 86% and 91% if not all 4 cores at 100%

[bruce]

Which GPU drivers are you using? (You should have installed something directly from ATI.) I wouldn't trust whatever ships with Arch.

[seatsea]

I'm using the closed source catalyst drivers, I have to for opencl support as far as I know.

[bruce]

I've folded with almost all of the following (sinstall script supplied to Ubuntu by xorg-edgers)
NV ersion 355.06 (open source)
NV Version 340.76 [340-updates) (proprietary)
NV Version 346.82 (346-updatees)
NV Version 352.30 (open source)
NV Version 340.76 (open source)
NV Version 346.87 (open source)

The only driver that didn't work is Nouveau.

[seatsea]

Isn't nouveau for Nvidia? I'm using an AMD R9 208x, not an Nvidia.

[seatsea]

I'm testing if using Linux Mint helps, and it seems to be the same problem.
Using the fglrx drivers, making sure I put in my passkey and all. Same problem, very low PPD, FAHcore cpu usage 350% and GPU usage below 20%.
Seems like this is a distro independent problem.

[bruce]

Yes, Nouveau is for NVidia. So are all the others I listed.

The point here is that if I didn't get the drver from the maker of the GPU, it has a very small chance of working. I understand that statement applies to both NV and ATI.

[seatsea]

Well I'm using the fglrx drivers, which are from AMD, so that's not the problem.
The open source drivers don't have opencl support, so they won't work that's for sure.
Should I maybe create a new post as this issue seems to be distro independent?