GCC-9 upgrades break folding

It seems that a lot of GPU problems revolve around specific versions of drivers. Though NVidia has their own support structure, you can often learn from information reported by others who fold.

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Runaway1956
Posts: 27
Joined: Mon Feb 15, 2016 12:19 pm

GCC-9 upgrades break folding

Post by Runaway1956 »

I drive an Antix linux, a rolling release. After the most recent update/upgrade, folding stopped working.

GCC-8 was upgraded to GCC-9, but the FAHClient was unable to use GCC-9. Everything just came to a halt, with error messages about "no opencl device" and "no opencl defined" along with a couple of others. It took a good bit of searching to figure out why I suddenly had no opencl devices.

If you are hit with GCC upgrades, the simplest solution is to install the update-alternatives package from your distro, then "install" both GCC and G++ into update-alternatives. Then choose to use GCC-8 rather than GCC-9. The help page that proved to be most valuable to me: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1028601 ... untu-18-04 You can actually copy/paste commands from that page into your own terminal, change the versions as necessary, then enter the commands. Or, to be safer, c/p into a text editor, do the editing necessary, then enter the commands into your root terminal.

Note that this doesn't appear to be a FAH problem, exactly. The problem is that nVidia looks for a particular GCC during installation, and refuses to install if it doesn't find a matching GCC. You may force install from the .run file, with --override, but folding won't work, and I suspect any other applications trying to use opencl will also fail.

Just ensure that the nVidia driver can access the compiler it is looking for, and the problem is solved.
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MarcvdM
Posts: 14
Joined: Mon Apr 06, 2020 7:02 am

Re: GCC-9 upgrades break folding

Post by MarcvdM »

I guess you run an old nvidia driver? I'm on Fedora 31, gcc version gcc-9.3.1-2.fc31.x86_64. No issues with folding. kernel is at 5.6.13-200.fc31.x86_64, and nvidia driver at 440.82. dkms used to build the nvidia kernel modules
PS - folding doesn't "use" gcc. gcc is used to compile stuff, folding installs as a binary.
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