All things Linux

Tom M
Tom M
Joined: 2 Feb 06
Posts: 5589
Credit: 7674766074
RAC: 1815153
Topic 227107

Linux
3.19.0-80-generic

This seems to be a 32 bit version? Of a release 14 of Linux.

And it is what some of our top performing computers at e@h are using.

This gives new meaning to "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" :)

Tom M

 

A Proud member of the O.F.A.  (Old Farts Association).  Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® (Garrison Keillor)

mikey
mikey
Joined: 22 Jan 05
Posts: 11889
Credit: 1828139831
RAC: 204308

Tom M

Tom M wrote:

Linux
3.19.0-80-generic

This seems to be a 32 bit version? Of a release 14 of Linux.

And it is what some of our top performing computers at e@h are using.

This gives new meaning to "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" :)

Tom M 

Maybe less overhead so more memory available to the OS? Or maybe it's just a smaller footprint so loads in a VM easier.

mountkidd
mountkidd
Joined: 14 Jun 12
Posts: 175
Credit: 10894930556
RAC: 5553389

Tom M

Tom M wrote:

Linux
3.19.0-80-generic

This seems to be a 32 bit version? Of a release 14 of Linux.

And it is what some of our top performing computers at e@h are using.

This gives new meaning to "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" :)

Tom M

...some...?  There's only one of the Top 50 hosts running 3.19.0-80.  We see Fiji listed as the top card out of 8 in this host, but know nothing of the other 7 cards.  Ubuntu 14 was the last version to support the fglrx video driver.   So I believe there are older cards in this host that are most easily supported via fglrx.

Current driver amdgpu doesn't support some of the earlier video cards like the HD 7970 which can still produce credits of ~600k/day.   One of my hosts is still on Ubuntu 14 & fglrx for this reason. 

Ian&Steve C.
Ian&Steve C.
Joined: 19 Jan 20
Posts: 3681
Credit: 33836449713
RAC: 37430072

Tom is likely referring to

Tom is likely referring to this system from Gaurav: https://einsteinathome.org/host/12219055

 

shows 64GB of system memory, so definitely NOT a 32-bit OS, it's 64-bit. and the very first google search result pulls up "amd64: 14.04 (Trusty) Ubuntu" so it's really confusing how one could come to the conclusion that this linux kernel is somehow "32-bit"

 

 "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". sometimes when folks have a working recipe, they don't want to change it. his older AMD GPUs probably have something to do with it. or it's a work computer and he's not able to update the kernel for administrative reasons. or <insert any other reason>.

 

pretty sure his GPU config is 4x AMD Radeon Pro Duo, which has 2x Fiji GPUs per physical card. 4 cards = 8 GPUs for BOINC.

 

only Gaurav knows why. why not just message him?

_________________________________________________________________________

Tom M
Tom M
Joined: 2 Feb 06
Posts: 5589
Credit: 7674766074
RAC: 1815153

Ian&Steve C. wrote: only

Ian&Steve C. wrote:

only Gaurav knows why. why not just message him?

Where is the fun in that?   ;)

Tom M

 

A Proud member of the O.F.A.  (Old Farts Association).  Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® (Garrison Keillor)

Keith Myers
Keith Myers
Joined: 11 Feb 11
Posts: 4704
Credit: 17546619098
RAC: 6411545

I haven't updated my Jetson

I haven't updated my Jetson Nano to the current distro mainly because I would probably break my custom Einstein BRP4 application and would have to completely recompile it.

It was a major pain in the first place to get all the moving pieces in the correct place for a successful compile.

So it ain't broke now.  Why chance it?

 

Gary Roberts
Gary Roberts
Moderator
Joined: 9 Feb 05
Posts: 5842
Credit: 109400059981
RAC: 35654746

mountkidd wrote: ... Current

mountkidd wrote:

... Current driver amdgpu doesn't support some of the earlier video cards like the HD 7970 ...

Actually, the amdgpu driver does support the particular GPU (Tahiti series - GCN 1st gen) you mention.

Below is some data from one of my hosts with a HD 7950 variant of that same Tahiti series.  I also have a bunch of HD 7850 and HD 7870 cards (Pitcairn) which are also GCN 1st gen, all using amdgpu as the driver with OpenCL coming from the 20.40 version of AMD's AMDGPU-PRO software package -- AMD call it Radeon Software for Linux these days.  AMD support Red Hat, Ubuntu and OpenSUSE and I just grab the bits I need from the Red Hat package and install that for my unsupported Linux variant (PCLinuxOS).

The data below is the output of a home made bash utility I wrote (called inf) specifically to show just the current hardware/software information of direct interest to me for any host in the fleet.  From my control machine, I just use ssh to go to any particular host ($H60 identifies it) of interest and launch the inf utility.  I can see what I need immediately and It saves me having to keep a full manual record of the hardware/software status of every individual host I'm running.

[gary@eros ~]$ ssh $H60
[gary@g3258-07 ~]$ inf
.bashex is current version - Loading data, please wait ...

Host: g3258-07   Date: Wed Mar  2 10:55:04 AM AEST 2022   Uptime: Up 25 days, 14 hrs, 44 min, 46 sec.

Memory:   RAM total: 7.72 GiB    RAM used: 1.11 GiB (14.4%)     GPU VRAM: 3072MB

CPU, GPU, Hard Disk devices:
CPU:  Intel Pentium G3258    Speed: 968 MHz   Min/Max: 800/3200 MHz
GPU1: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Tahiti PRO [HD 7950/8950 OEM / R9 280]  Driver: amdgpu  Chip-ID: 1002:679a   Vendor: Sapphire
HDD:  Western Digital   Model: WDS120G2G0A-00JH30       Size: 111.8 GiB

Disk partitions:        Disklabel type:  dos
Device     Boot        Start              End        Sectors     Size    Id  Type
/dev/sda1               2048     31459327     31457280      15G    83  Linux
/dev/sda2        31459328     35653631       4194304       2G     82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda3        35653632   234455039    198801408   94.8G    83  Linux

Filesystem sizes and available space:
Filesystem       Size  Used    Avail  Use%  Mounted on
/dev/root         15G    5.8G    8.2G    42%   /
/dev/sda3        94G   326M   89G      1%   /home

Display driver (xorg.conf):
    BoardName "ATI Radeon HD 6400 and later (radeon/fglrx)"
    Driver "amdgpu"
    Option "DPMS"

Network: eth0  192.168.0.60/24

Kernel:  5.15.16-pclos1                    Installed:   2022-02-04 20:07:28

Repo:    Elements/Local_Repo/          Installed:   2022-02-04 19:19:20

OpenCL:  20.40                               Installed:   2021-03-18 18:43:13

BOINC:   7.16.11                              Installed:   2020-12-17 14:50:19

Host-ID: 430276 (school)        RPC_seqno: 180191       Total Credit: 731,302,300       RAC: 478,839

[gary@g3258-07 ~]$

 

Some of the formatting/coloration has been lost by just copying from the terminal session but the essential information should be quite easy to decipher.  You can see the machine was updated around a month ago and is running a very recent kernel - 5.15.16 - which is in the latest LTS series - so hopefully I wont need to touch it for quite a while :-).

Cheers,
Gary.

Tom M
Tom M
Joined: 2 Feb 06
Posts: 5589
Credit: 7674766074
RAC: 1815153

This is one of the most

This is one of the most useful replacements for elements of a Windows task manager that someone has ever given me.  I was then a mainly Windows BOINC player and had just gotten a first generation Top-end Threadripper.  You remember. The one with a "hacked together" memory system that ran real slow if you tried to use more than 24? cpu cores/threads.

This displays all the threads processing speed.

Open a terminal session and paste this on the command line.

 

<command prompt>watch -n1 "cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep \"^[c]pu MHz\"" 

 

Thank you, Keith Myers

Tom M

A Proud member of the O.F.A.  (Old Farts Association).  Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® (Garrison Keillor)

Keith Myers
Keith Myers
Joined: 11 Feb 11
Posts: 4704
Credit: 17546619098
RAC: 6411545

There are other options also,

There are other options also, like GUI interfaces to monitor thread speeds.

The cpufreq GNOME extension by konkor is nice.  Sits in the taskbar.

The cpu monitor tiles in GKrellm is another.

If running a Zen or Epyc or Threadripper cpu, the zenpower kernel module coupled with zenmonitor is very good also.

All will give you constantly updated thread clocks.

Or the Terminal command line is always available and quick.

 

Tom M
Tom M
Joined: 2 Feb 06
Posts: 5589
Credit: 7674766074
RAC: 1815153

Someone just asked me in PM

Someone just asked me in PM if the Linux implementation of "Gpu suspend" when user is active is working. 

His experience is once it suspended it wouldn't "restart".  Seems like my experience under Windows was also that once you have "gpu suspend" you can never "catch" it processing.  But clearly it does later?

Tom M

A Proud member of the O.F.A.  (Old Farts Association).  Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® (Garrison Keillor)

HAL
HAL
Joined: 9 Mar 20
Posts: 1759
Credit: 34543838
RAC: 39963

Tom M wrote: Someone just

Tom M wrote:

Someone just asked me in PM if the Linux implementation of "Gpu suspend" when user is active is working. 

His experience is once it suspended it wouldn't "restart".  Seems like my experience under Windows was also that once you have "gpu suspend" you can never "catch" it processing.  But clearly it does later?

Tom M

Yea that was me :-).

For the readers in this thread: I have another computer that I'm running this project on and I need to use it for other purposes throughout the evening. It will run GPU tasks (NVIDEA) but it makes the mouse and screen laggy, so I tried to use the this from web based prefs -

Suspend GPU computing when computer is in use?: yes/no

Suspends GPU computing when you're using the computer. "In use" means mouse/keyboard input in last: minutes This determines when the computer is considered "in use".

 

However, it will never resume the GPU work units after any amount of time (after computer is not in use). The only way I can get the GPU WUs to resume is to allow them to run in sequence after other CPU WU's finish.

 

I'm just using the BOINC package from the Linux Mint repository, same as I've used for years v7.16.6. I just recently decided to try some GPU work to see how it would go. It does the work fine, but as I've stated, I can't use my computer with them running. If it was a computer that was specifically devoted to this project (like the other one I have) it wouldn't matter so much. There is a bug report I found about it here -

 

Processing work units with "outdated" (according to Microsoft) Ryzen 7 1700

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.