Arch Linux User Repository

To be clear, nvidia users need to enable both foldingathome.service and foldingathome-nvidia.service.

@BS86 Not sure, my GPU is too old for F@H. Maybe an After= in the unit file would fix it?

And apparently, the user "fah" also does not exist on my system because it was not required by this package until now. Only the noroot-package needed it.

@alucryd: If the xorg breakage and GPU detection is solved with the previous comments, and you want to stick with the DynamicUser approach, might you please add a installation warning that the user "fah" needs to be created?

@jpkotta: Does this also solve the xorg - breakage mentioned in the Wiki?

@BS86 @alucryd You need to add SupplementaryGroups=video to the service file.

@alucryd There seems to be a regression in the latest version that is causing folding@home to not download the GPUs.txt file. This is what it uses to detect what GPUs it can and cannot use. Without it, it will not use any GPU.

Copying from the old directory /opt/fah/GPUs.txt to /etc/foldingathome fixes the issue.

See: https://github.com/FoldingAtHome/fah-issues/issues/1363

New version breaks folding@home for Nvidia gpus, because only root can create the device necessary to use cuda. Atleast according to what i found so far. Problem only starts after the first reboot, because the necessary device does not exist anymore. https://www.pgroup.com/userforum/viewtopic.php?t=4587

GPU 0: Bus:1 Slot:0 Func:0 NVIDIA:8 GP104 [GeForce GTX 1080] 8873 CUDA: Not detected: cuInit() returned 999 OpenCL: Not detected: clGetPlatformIDs() returned -1001

Log when FAHclient is started as root: GPU 0: Bus:1 Slot:0 Func:0 NVIDIA:8 GP104 [GeForce GTX 1080] 8873 CUDA Device 0: Platform:0 Device:0 Bus:1 Slot:0 Compute:6.1 Driver:10.2 OpenCL Device 0: Platform:0 Device:0 Bus:1 Slot:0 Compute:1.2 Driver:440.82

apparently, foldingathome switched to the noroot - approach with DynamicUser which breaks GPU usage (check Wiki for details: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Folding@home#Run_f@h_with_limited_privileges)

would be great to have this package here in the future, too (if foldingathome copies the approach from here, that would work to)

For some reason, with that commit today (Version 7.5.1-2) : https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/commit/?h=foldingathome&id=d6dac582292af9d594c9d8bf7f9b6a4f8e56fa4c

This package switched to the DynamicUser approach which is troublesome, check the wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Folding@home#Run_f@h_with_limited_privileges

Quote:

To use your graphics card for this task the fah user has to be in the required group (video). But doing this will also cause the foldingathome.service to start before Xorg and breaking it in the process.

The last working version for me is 7.5.1-1

@alucryd The chown way is definitely the way to go but it still does not work because the directory /etc/foldingathome is owned by root and therefore FAHClient cannot remove the old configuration when it needs to update (yes, it first removes it and then writes a new one). There are 16:31:39:WARNING:Exception: Failed to remove '/etc/foldingathome/config.xml': Permission denied warnings in the log when it tries to update.

@alucryd

Thanks thats fixed it.