Unable to get Debian client working

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rainstormledgers
Posts: 3
Joined: Mon Mar 09, 2020 4:34 am

Unable to get Debian client working

Post by rainstormledgers »

I want to preface this all by saying this project is amazing and I support this effort 100%!

Brand new install of Debian 10. Card is a GTX 1060. The goal is to get this working on OpenCL, since I would imagine it is significantly faster than my cpu.

I am using the proprietary nvidia driver from the repo, 418.74.

A few issues:

1. Installation of the fahclient package seems to fail, with the error:

Code: Select all

dpkg: error processing package fahclient (--configure):
 installed fahclient package post-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
 fahclient
However, it seems I can run the "FAHClient" command and it begins to execute without issue. But I get that error for fahclient every time I use apt.

2. fahcontrol is not installable, with the following error:
fahcontrol : Depends: python-gnome2 but it is not installable

Attempting to install in python-gnome2 Debian 10 gives me the following error:
Package python-gnome2 is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source

I'm assuming I can proceed with just the fahclient? Hopefully?

3. There is no documentation for how OpenCL is used here. OpenCL is not even mentioned in the advanced install docs.

I'm assuming that OpenCL has to be working on my system for FAH to work? It might be nice to document this somewhere for folks that have never used OpenCL before, maybe even just say "OpenCL must be working on your system. You can confirm this with the "clinfo" command."

I was told by the debian team that to install opencl I need to install the "nvidia-opencl-icd" package, so I did that, and then the "clinfo" command started producing sane output. However...

4. FAH could not find the OpenCL lib, ie libOpenCL.so. There is no documentation for this, but I want to describe what worked for me. I had to install the following package:
nvidia-libopencl1

but that still wasn't enough unfortunately, as fahclient is looking for libOpenCL.so, not libOpenCL.so.1.

I had to create a symlink thusly:
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libOpenCL.so.1 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libOpenCL.so

The main issue I would like to resolve is fahclient breaking apt on my system. Is there a way to fix that?
bruce
Posts: 20824
Joined: Thu Nov 29, 2007 10:13 pm
Location: So. Cal.

Re: Unable to get Debian client working

Post by bruce »

OpenCL is normally delivered with the NVidia proprietary drivers. If they told you to install the OpenCL package separately, that's fine, too. It's the API that FAHCore_* uses.

FAHClient is a daemon which connects to the internet to get a work assignments, one for your CPU and one for your GPU. Depending on how much heat you want to generate, you can run either one or both. FAHCote_a7 will be used to process the CPU assignment and FAHCore_2* will be used to process a WU on your GPU provided you have the appropriate drivers installed.

FAHControl provides a user interface and is used to manage FAHClient. It probably isn't installing because it wants support for the obsolete Python2. A new client is in the works which will no longer have this dependency. FAHControl is very convenient, but not essential as FAHClient generally picks pretty reasonable defaults.
foldy
Posts: 2040
Joined: Sat Dec 01, 2012 3:43 pm
Hardware configuration: Folding@Home Client 7.6.13 (1 GPU slots)
Windows 7 64bit
Intel Core i5 2500k@4Ghz
Nvidia gtx 1080ti driver 441

Re: Unable to get Debian client working

Post by foldy »

The main issue I would like to resolve is fahclient breaking apt on my system. Is there a way to fix that?
rm /var/lib/dpkg/info/fahclient.postinst
rainstormledgers
Posts: 3
Joined: Mon Mar 09, 2020 4:34 am

Re: Unable to get Debian client working

Post by rainstormledgers »

bruce wrote:OpenCL is normally delivered with the NVidia proprietary drivers. If they told you to install the OpenCL package separately, that's fine, too. It's the API that FAHCore_* uses.

FAHClient is a daemon which connects to the internet to get a work assignments, one for your CPU and one for your GPU. Depending on how much heat you want to generate, you can run either one or both. FAHCote_a7 will be used to process the CPU assignment and FAHCore_2* will be used to process a WU on your GPU provided you have the appropriate drivers installed.

FAHControl provides a user interface and is used to manage FAHClient. It probably isn't installing because it wants support for the obsolete Python2. A new client is in the works which will no longer have this dependency. FAHControl is very convenient, but not essential as FAHClient generally picks pretty reasonable defaults.
Understood, thank you!
rainstormledgers
Posts: 3
Joined: Mon Mar 09, 2020 4:34 am

Re: Unable to get Debian client working

Post by rainstormledgers »

foldy wrote:
The main issue I would like to resolve is fahclient breaking apt on my system. Is there a way to fix that?
rm /var/lib/dpkg/info/fahclient.postinst
Thank you, this worked!!
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