[Bug 1407452] Re: [AMD A4-5300] boinc fails to detect GPU

[Ken Sharp]

Okay, I screwed up the initial testing: in short, it all works when logged in as the current user.
(Note: do *not* enable SSH X forwarding when testing)

This PC automatically logs into an X session as user1. Remember: user1
is logged in before boinc starts.

1. sudo service boinc-client stop
2. Change BOINC_USER=boinc to BOINC_USER=user1 in /etc/default/boinc (some parts of the init script can be cleaned up too)
3. Add "sleep 10" to startup() in /etc/init.d/boinc-client to allow the user to log in (needed)
4. sudo chown -R user1: /etc/boinc-client/*
5. sudo chown -R user1: /var/lib/boinc-client
6. sudo service boinc-client start

05-Jan-2015 13:10:56 [---] CAL: ATI GPU 0: AMD Radeon HD 7400/7500/8300/8400 series (Scrapper) (CAL version 1.4.1848, 768MB, 648MB available, 463 GFLOPS peak)
05-Jan-2015 13:10:56 [---] OpenCL: AMD/ATI GPU 0: AMD Radeon HD 7400/7500/8300/8400 series (Scrapper) (driver version 1642.5 (VM), device version OpenCL 1.2 AMD-APP (1642.5), 768MB, 648MB available, 463 GFLOPS peak)
05-Jan-2015 13:10:56 [---] OpenCL CPU: AMD A4-5300 APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics (OpenCL driver vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., driver version 1642.5 (sse2,avx,fma4), device version OpenCL 1.2 AMD-APP (1642.5))

Downloading directly from BOINC and running as user1 works out of the
box.

So there are permission problems in the BOINC packages (in Trusty at
least) that will not allow the GPU to be detected. The line "xhost
local:boinc" is not enough to grant user:boinc access to the GPU.

This thread talks about some workarounds, but this really needs to be fixed (if possible):
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=6307

I don't think this is an upstream issue: I think it needs to be fixed
this end.

** Description changed:

  BOINC fails to detect the GPU of the AMD A4-5300 APU.
  
  With the OpenCL drivers and the latest AMD SDK installed it detects the
  CPU as OpenCL-capable, but not the GPU.
  
  04-Jan-2015 15:26:43 [---] [coproc] launching child process at /usr/bin/boinc
  04-Jan-2015 15:26:43 [---] [coproc] relative to directory /var/lib/boinc-client
  04-Jan-2015 15:26:43 [---] [coproc] with data directory /var/lib/boinc-client
  04-Jan-2015 15:26:43 [---] OpenCL CPU: AMD A4-5300 APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics (OpenCL driver vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., driver version 1642.5 (sse2,avx,fma4), device version OpenCL 1.2 AMD-APP (1642.5))
  04-Jan-2015 15:26:43 [---] No NVIDIA library found
  04-Jan-2015 15:26:43 [---] calInit() returned 1
  04-Jan-2015 15:26:43 [---] No usable GPUs found
  
  There are various articles on the BOINC forums, and the various
  projects' forums, all giving advice that doesn't help, but this should
  really work out of the box. I am unable to get this to work at all.
  
  user:boinc is already part of group:video  - video:x:44:boinc
  
  Also tried with 7.4.23 from PPA
  https://launchpad.net/~costamagnagianfranco/+archive/ubuntu/boinc
  
- Irritatingly it did work ONCE running 7.4.22 (from the BOINC website) as
- the logged in user, but I have no idea why or how to recreate this. I
- tried setting "xhost +" too but this had no effect.
  
- ubuntu-bug refuses to report this bug.
+ ubuntu-bug refuses to report this.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1407452

Title:
  [AMD A4-5300] boinc fails to detect GPU

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