Anyone have luck with Folding@Home and OpenCL on AMD RX580?

[Richard Shaw]

I recently setup Folding@Home on my Fedora 31 box and have it running on
the CPU no problem but the package is not without issues...

It installs a SysV init script which SystemD generates a service file from
it, but fahclient runs as the fahclient user but AFAICT SystemD doesn't
know that, which I've read can cause problems with accessing the GPU.

So I went ahead and wrote a SystemD service file for fahclient, but no
luck. I've also added fahclient to the video group, nope...

I've installed the packages I think I need from AMD (which are really EL 8
packages) but they all install into /opt so my current theory is that FAH
isn't finding the libraries...

Current OpenCL error is:
OpenCL: Not Detected: clGetDeviceIDs() returned -1

Anyone successfully got this working?

[Michal Schorm]

Hi,
I've been able to run FAH on my GTX 1060.
They say the Nvidia setup should be much easier than for AMD GPU, but
it is still a pain ... :/

I had to configure a firewall, download proprietary NVIDIA drivers and
install them (which means switching the nouveau kernel module for the
proprietary one) and install some additional libraries (needed by
FAH).
I've lost a day trying to set it up, searching WHAT and HOW [1] has to
be done - since the help from FAH project side is close to zero.

At the end, you have no idea, if it works or not, until the GPU
actually starts computing. but since it may take hours to get a work
unit for your GPU, you may find the correct configuration, but not
knowing it ...
It also means, it may have worked with the nouveau drivers, but I
couldn't know ... it's a total mess.
I highly discourage trying it unless they (FAH upstream) will have
better support for ... everything. And probably also until they
opensource the project again, so people for different distros could
help them. They just stuck their head to the sand ...
I have it running on Windows 7 now. :(

Here is my DNF history related to this task:
  dnf  install ./fahclient-7.5.1-1.x86_64.rpm
./fahcontrol-7.5.1-1.noarch.rpm ./fahviewer-7.5.1-1.x86_64.rpm
  dnf install /usr/lib64/libcuda.so /usr/lib64/libOpenCL.so
  dnf install --disablerepo=*
/tmp/akmods.i6AeSrCB/results/kmod-nvidia-340xx-5.5.8-200.fc31.x86_64-340.108-1.fc31.x86_64.rpm
  dnf remove xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-340xx-cuda-340.108-1.fc31.x86_64
  dnf install nvidia-modprobe
  dnf install kernel-devel kernel-headers gcc make dkms acpid
libglvnd-glx libglvnd-opengl libglvnd-devel pkgconfig
  dnf remove xorg-x11-drv-nouveau
  dnf remove *xorg*nvidia*
  dnf reinstall kernel-core
  dnf install opencl* libclc*
  install ocl-icd-devel.i686
  install /usr/bin/clinfo

Hope you get the idea ...

[1] https://www.if-not-true-then-false.com/2015/fedora-nvidia-guide/

--

Michal Schorm
Software Engineer
Core Services - Databases Team
Red Hat

--

On Thu, Apr 2, 2020 at 8:23 PM Richard Shaw  wrote:
> I recently setup Folding@Home on my Fedora 31 box and have it running on the CPU no problem but the package is not without issues...
>
> It installs a SysV init script which SystemD generates a service file from it, but fahclient runs as the fahclient user but AFAICT SystemD doesn't know that, which I've read can cause problems with accessing the GPU.
>
> So I went ahead and wrote a SystemD service file for fahclient, but no luck. I've also added fahclient to the video group, nope...
>
> I've installed the packages I think I need from AMD (which are really EL 8 packages) but they all install into /opt so my current theory is that FAH isn't finding the libraries...
>
> Current OpenCL error is:
> OpenCL: Not Detected: clGetDeviceIDs() returned -1
>
> Anyone successfully got this working?
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[Richard Shaw]

On Fri, Apr 3, 2020 at 7:04 AM Michal Schorm  wrote:
> Hi,
> I've been able to run FAH on my GTX 1060.
> They say the Nvidia setup should be much easier than for AMD GPU, but
> it is still a pain ... :/

Ironically I just "upgraded" from a GTX 1050 to my RX580 to get away from
the Nvidia proprietary drivers :)

I guess I could put in my GTX 1050 along side the RX580 and just use the
GTX for FAH?

Thanks,
Richard

[Richard Shaw]

Reporting some partial success...

Their amdgpu-install program is useless so I just created a local
repository myself in /var/local and created a amdgpu.repo file in
/etc/yum.repos.d/ to point to it.

I finally figured out I needed the orca library and not the amdgpu library.
I thought my RX 580 was new enough but apparently mine falls into the
"legacy" OpenCL driver.

That got clinfo working for both the system version and the amdgpu version:

Platform #0: Clover
 `-- Device #0: Radeon RX 580 Series (POLARIS10, DRM 3.36.0,
5.5.13-200.fc31.x86_64, LLVM 9.0.0)
Platform #1: AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing
 `-- Device #0: Ellesmere
Platform #2: Portable Computing Language
 `-- Device #0: pthread-AMD Ryzen 5 2600 Six-Core Processor
Platform #3: Intel Gen OCL Driver

Notice the Ellesmere line. I get something similar from
/opt/amdgpu-pro/bin/clinfo.

So they both think it's working. I'm still getting clGetDeviceIDs: (-1)
from FAH and I have added fahclient to both the video and render groups.
Also I ensured that's actually getting passed to FAHClient which does not
work when using the SysV script.

# cat /proc/$(pidof FAHClient)/status | grep Groups
Groups: 39 578 863

39 is "video" and 578 is "render".

For posterity here's my /etc/systemd/system/FAHClient.service:

# systemctl cat FAHClient.service
# /etc/systemd/system/FAHClient.service
# /run/systemd/generator.late/FAHClient.service

[Unit]
Description=Folding@home Client
After=remote-fs.target
After=network-online.target
Wants=network-online.target

[Service]
Type=simple
WorkingDirectory=/var/lib/fahclient
User=fahclient
ExecStart=/usr/bin/FAHClient /etc/fahclient/config.xml

Thanks,
Richard

[Richard Shaw]

Ok, I THINK i may have got it working!!!

For posterity here are the amdgpu (amd proprietary) packages I had to
install. I'm still running the open source drivers for video.

# rpm -qa | grep amdgpu
libdrm-amdgpu-2.4.99-967956.el8.x86_64
libdrm-amdgpu-common-1.0.0-967956.el8.noarch
clinfo-amdgpu-pro-19.50-967956.el8.x86_64
opencl-amdgpu-pro-comgr-19.50-967956.el8.x86_64
amdgpu-pro-core-19.50-967956.el8.noarch
opencl-orca-amdgpu-pro-icd-19.50-967956.el8.x86_64
libopencl-amdgpu-pro-19.50-967956.el8.x86_64

There were two more things I had to do to get it working.

1. It seems most programs aren't smart enough to go through all the vendors
in /etc/OpenCL/vendors and find the working one, they try the first and
give up.

2. Once you have FAH running and it doesn't find a GPU the first time it
stops looking and you can't add it manually. You have to edit
/etc/fahclient/config.xml and remove the "GPU=False" line and restart
FAHClient.

Thanks,
Richard

[Richard Shaw]

I didn't find another good place to document the process for others so I
created an Ask Fedora Topic:

https://ask.fedoraproject.org/t/setting-up-folding-home-to-use-opencl-with-t...

Thanks,
Richard