"GPU Missing" message
9 Jul 2013 11:06:21 UTC
Topic 197048
(moderation:
I've been running Einstein for a couple months now, getting GPU tasks only (running alongside Milky Way, which won't run on my nVidia GT520 but does fine with CPU-only tasks). I'm running Linux, specifically MEPIS 11 32-bit (2.6.36 kernel version). Last night, I completed a minor upgrade, adding the Physical Address Extensions kernel to allow full use of a recent 4 GiB RAM upgrade and installing the kernel-bound nVidia driver version 319.23.
This morning, I notice that Einstein is reporting "GPU missing" and my tasks aren't executing. Is the Einstein GPU software incompatible with PAE, or is this a problem with the freshly updated nVidia driver (which I'm sure is working, else I wouldn't be able to start up at full screen resolution)?
"GPU Missing" message
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Hi!
This must be a message in BOINC manager saying that the GPU that was scheduled by BOINC to crunch an Einstein@Home task is no longer detected by BOINC. So the Einstein@Home app is not even started, and has no role in this problem. BOINC will list the detected graphics cards near the beginning of the list of messages in the "Event Log" ("Advanced" menu item of the BOINC Manager in Expert Mode).
Note that if you install NVIDIA Linux drivers from NVIDIA's website (outside the control of your distribution's package manager), you will have to reinstall them manually after each update of the Linux Kernel. Actually it is enough to execute the driver setup with the -K command line option (to recompile the kernel module).
Hope this helps,
Cheers
HB
RE: This must be a message
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Yes, you're correct, this is BOINC Manager actually reporting this; the message you refer to from the benckmarks and "waking up" section at the beginning of the messages panel is "No usable GPUs found" followed by "Application uses missing NVIDIA GPU" -- but I am certain my nVidia GPU is not "missing", else I'd have no screen display. I updated the graphics driver along with installing the kernel extension for RAM => 4 GiB; and yes, I do have to manually reinstall my nVidia drivers (drivers update much more frequently than Kernels; MEPIS doesn't use rolling updates), because the ones supplied by the MEPIS package managers are ancient and don't work with a lot of things.
So, do I have to ask somewhere else to find out if I need to update something else to work with the current nVidia driver version?
Okay, never mind -- I found a
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Okay, never mind -- I found a discussion (from a couple years ago, on a distro-specific forum) about how to get BOINC to run with nVidia and it mentioned something I've never had an issue with previously. Apparently, I was always supposed to need a "CUDA tool kit" installed in order for BOINC to access the CUDA capabilities of my GPU; for MEPIS 11, that seems to be libcuda1 and/or libnvcuvid1. I installed those packages, rebooted, and now Einstein is happily running GPU tasks again.
I had problems getting boinc
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I had problems getting boinc on debian to recognize my gtx580. After much googling and installing new kernels and every package mentioned in posts I finally stumbled on an old post mentioning the cuda toolkit package which made boinc (and me) happy.
It seems to me linux has both the worst documentation of any os (whatever comes with the distro) and the best (google)