Folding Forum

Hi. I'm trying to get folding set up on my laptop with Arch and I can't get GPU folding to work (whereas I was able to get it working with Ubuntu). I'm running a rather minimal installation since folding is all I want this computer to do. My laptop has a Geforce 930mx.

I set up FAH using the information found on the AUR page (https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/foldingathome/). In addition to the foldingathome package, I also installed these four packages via pacman: clinfo cuda ocl-icd nvidia. I also made sure that opencl-nvidia was installed (which it was). Finally, I ran sudo nvidia-xconfig, enabled foldingathome.service and foldingathome-nvidia.service, configured FAH, and rebooted my system. Lo and behold, GPU folding isn't folding, but CPU is just fine.

The first thing I checked was the status of foldingathome-nvidia.service, and it turns out it was dead. Below is the output of sytemctl status foldingathome-nvidia. I assume that this has something to do with my driver configuration, but I'm new to Arch and don't know these things. Please help me out.

● foldingathome-nvidia.service - Folding@home helper for NVIDIA GPUs
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/foldingathome-nvidia.service; enabled; vendor preset: disabled)
Active: inactive (dead) since Fri 2020-04-24 20:15:29 AEST; 16min ago
Process: 612 ExecStart=/usr/bin/nvidia-modprobe (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
Process: 613 ExecStart=/usr/bin/nvidia-modprobe -c 0 -u (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
Process: 614 ExecStart=/usr/bin/clinfo (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
Main PID: 614 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)

Apr 24 20:15:29 folding-probook clinfo[614]: clCreateContext(NULL, ...) [default] No platform
Apr 24 20:15:29 folding-probook clinfo[614]: clCreateContext(NULL, ...) [other] Success [NV]
Apr 24 20:15:29 folding-probook clinfo[614]: clCreateContextFromType(NULL, CL_DEVICE_TYPE_DEFAULT) No platform
Apr 24 20:15:29 folding-probook clinfo[614]: clCreateContextFromType(NULL, CL_DEVICE_TYPE_CPU) No devices found in platform
Apr 24 20:15:29 folding-probook clinfo[614]: clCreateContextFromType(NULL, CL_DEVICE_TYPE_GPU) No platform
Apr 24 20:15:29 folding-probook clinfo[614]: clCreateContextFromType(NULL, CL_DEVICE_TYPE_ACCELERATOR) No devices found in platform
Apr 24 20:15:29 folding-probook clinfo[614]: clCreateContextFromType(NULL, CL_DEVICE_TYPE_CUSTOM) Invalid device type for platform
Apr 24 20:15:29 folding-probook clinfo[614]: clCreateContextFromType(NULL, CL_DEVICE_TYPE_ALL) No platform
Apr 24 20:15:29 folding-probook systemd[1]: foldingathome-nvidia.service: Succeeded.
Apr 24 20:15:29 folding-probook systemd[1]: Finished Folding@home helper for NVIDIA GPUs.


Quick edit: manually adding in the GPU slot made GPU folding work (foldingathome-nvidia.service still refuses to start), but I don't think it's good to leave things like this since the maintainer explicitly said that foldingathome-nvidia.service needs to be enabled.

Good you got GPU slot finally working. Maybe this thread can give you some hints too?
viewtopic.php?f=89&t=31205#p304145

Thanks for that. I've already done most of the stuff on there, however, there's still more to be done, even during initial setup. I'll try doing a complete reinstall of the system using that guide just to be sure.

Oh and by the way, FAHClient --info didn't pick up my GPU at all, despite commands like nvidia-smi and cat /proc/driver/nvidia/gpus/*/information picking them up.

foldy wrote:Good you got GPU slot finally working. Maybe this thread can give you some hints too?
viewtopic.php?f=89&t=31205#p304145

Nothing. After going through, I still ended up at the same result.


Another quick edit: I read through the comments in the foldingathome AUR page, and there's a comment that reports losing functionality in the latest release as well as three lines from their logs. I encountered almost the exact same thing in the FAHClient --info command. Here it is:
But apparently the user commented again saying it was fixed. Looks like I'll just have to contact the maintainer for help.

Your GPU has a high chance, it won't make the deadline.
Considering a GT1030 doing 22 hours on long WUs, a 930 MX would (est) do about 31 hours to finish a WU.
Might work if it's doing 24/7 folding, but pause it, and you might miss the deadline.