HOWTO: How I got my R9 290 folding on Linux

[Frogging101]

I tried following this, but I have still not made it work. I am running RX550 and Mint 19.3 . I have installed orca, but I am still getting this error
16:05:49:ERROR:WU00:FS01:Failed to start core: OpenCL device matching slot 1 not found, try setting 'opencl-index' manually

Any ideas what I could explore more? I am really determined to make it work

Could you post your log?

[ccgllc]

Have an R9 270X but the only drivers I'm seeing on the AMD site are for Ubuntu 14. Going to try using the 290's driver and see if that helps.

Nope - that is causing X to hang.

[Frogging101]

Have an R9 270X but the only drivers I'm seeing on the AMD site are for Ubuntu 14. Going to try using the 290's driver and see if that helps.

Nope - that is causing X to hang.

That's a GCN 1.0 (1st gen) card. I don't know what the story is with those. I believe they are not as well supported on Linux as GCN 1.1 (2nd gen) and later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_Rx_200_series#Chipset_table

[4n0n]

I suggest you make the same report at https://github.com/FoldingAtHome/fah-issues/issues. Someday the Developers will have time to examine those issues and fix most of them ... including things like your "This is a bug in FAH" mentioned above.

Done here: https://github.com/FoldingAtHome/fah-issues/issues/1418

[Joe_H]

As mentioned by Frogging101, the R9 270/270X are based on the older GCN1 architecture from AMD. AMD has been removing OpenCL support from the newer drivers for the older tech, so you might have to go back a version or two earlier on the drivers than mentioned in this topic for the 290/290X

[astrorob]

i guess it should be noted that adding the 'fahclient' user to the group 'video' is necessary for the client to find OpenCL devices.

i think OP alluded to this as a prior solution and is maybe well-known, but up until today i was running a linux box with only an nvidia GPU (which uses cuda i guess) and i didn't have to worry about OpenCL.

this thread helped me get the RX5500 going. for my part i used the 20.20 drivers and used amdgpu-pro-install --headless --opencl=pal. the first time around i didn't use --headless and it seems the presense of the AMD video drivers borked my X server. maybe there is some further configuration to do to force X to start on the nvidia card (or any card)

also i had installed mesa-opencl-icd and it seems that the RX5500 is listed under the Clover platform and the AMD Accelerated parallel processing platform. maybe this is a mistake.

somehow setting opencl-index and cuda-index to 0 on both slots was necessary to get them both running. at -1 for some reason the clients could not find the GPUs.

[JimF]

TL;DR For the users: To work around this, I created a systemd unit to start FAHClient instead of the init.d script. This works by using the systemd unit's "User" option to change users instead of having FAHClient do it.

It worked!
I have an RX 570 on Ubuntu 18.04.4, and it just wouldn't work with the latest drivers (amdgpu-pro-20.20), though it did with a previous version (except for the core 22 problems).

I installed the drivers with the standard AMD procedure: "./amdgpu-install --opencl=pal,legacy -y"
That installs both the PAL and legacy drivers, for when I upgrade.

I only had to set "open-cl index" = 0 (That is true for both Nvidia and AMD on Ubuntu, and has been for years.)

I also ran "sudo adduser fahclient video", though that may be unnecessary with this procedure.

Thanks!

[mr_raider]

Converting FAHClient to systemd service sometimes hangs up my boot. I have to manually kill the service then run startx to start the desktop.
Is their anyway to delay the service to start after the desktop is loaded?

[gunnarre]

Could you replace the Wants or Requires line with

Code: Select all

Requires=display-manager.service

and see if that helps? Any sign in the logs about what's wrong?

[mr_raider]

Could you replace the Wants or Requires line with

Code: Select all

Requires=display-manager.service

and see if that helps? Any sign in the logs about what's wrong?

Yeah sorry. I just disabled autostart on the service just start it manually after boot. I reboot only once a week or so anyway.

[Frogging101]

I've updated the OP with instructions to add the fahclient user to both the "video" and "render" groups. We knew about the "video" group already, but I just tried a new install on Kubuntu 20.04 and found that it did not work because on this installation, /dev/dri/renderD128 is in the "render" group instead of the "video" group. So you may need both if your system is like that.

[bruce]

There should be a script setting to tell Service B that it shouldn't start up until Service A is already running. (I don't know the Linux settings.) Somebody should open a ticket to get this added to FAH's startup script.

[PantherX]

...Somebody should open a ticket to get this added to FAH's startup script.

Deja Vu: https://github.com/FoldingAtHome/fah-issues/issues/1567