Linux 64, Mint 17, and Nvidia 340.24 driver

Message boards : Number crunching : Linux 64, Mint 17, and Nvidia 340.24 driver
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Profile ivan
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Message 1545733 - Posted: 22 Jul 2014, 7:49:38 UTC

I upgraded my home cruncher to Linux Mint 17 at the weekend because there were no more upgrades for Mint 15. Unfortunately you can't really upgrade, you have to do a new install, but I learnt long ago to keep /home on a separate partition so you don't have to recreate all your data and many of your personalisations.
I had to do a lot of fighting to get boimcmgr recompiled (boinc and boinccmd were OK) -- long story short, don't upgrade to wx3.0, stay with wx2.8.
I'm still using the stock applications, despite Petri having long ago sent me the recipes for updating Nvidia versions of MB and AP applications. So, I can only run AP on my video cards (1x GT 660 Ti + 1x GT 640), but I have been using libsleep.so to get around the busy-wait bug in the Nvidia drivers.
However, yesterday I got notification of several security updates, including the kernel, so as is my wont I downloaded the latest Nvidia driver too -- 340.24 (previously using 337.19). I'd had, as usual, the devil's own time banning the stock nouveau driver in favour of the proprietary Nvidia one when I upgraded but the step up to 340.24 went relatively easily -- one tip I learnt over the weekend, to kill X so you can go to runlevel 2 to install a new driver, use
sudo service stop mdm

Later, I realised that the gkrellm display was showing solid green CPU usage instead of the spiky look I was used to since starting using libsleep. Fired up top and sure enough, all four GPU AP jobs were using 100% CPU time and the processors were showing no idle time at all. I let it run overnight and this morning found that all recent AP results had CPU usage the same as overall time whereas heretofore it was in the ~10-30% range. So, I reinstalled the 337.19 driver and rebooted, and now the GPU AP jobs are back to 5-20% CPU and idle time is around 40% of a CPU.
So, beware if upgrading beyond 337.19 -- keep an eye on your CPU utilisation.
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Message 1546124 - Posted: 23 Jul 2014, 1:31:01 UTC

Yep, costa's BOINC 7.4 builds for Ubuntu has a tendency to not auto-refresh which is a bit of a nuisance. I presume it's also part of the difficulty of moving to wxWidgets 3.0.

I never managed to get BOINC to recognise NV GPUs with anything other than the standard Ubuntu nvidia drivers which at this point stands at 331 for Trusty. I don't know how much extra customising Mint does to the nvidia drivers.

I still haven't managed to compile AP binaries for Linux, only MB CUDA and MB CPU.
Soli Deo Gloria
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Message 1546268 - Posted: 23 Jul 2014, 7:59:08 UTC - in response to Message 1546124.  

I never managed to get BOINC to recognise NV GPUs with anything other than the standard Ubuntu nvidia drivers which at this point stands at 331 for Trusty. I don't know how much extra customising Mint does to the nvidia drivers.

Mint doesn't provide Nvidia drivers out-of-the-box, they give you xorg's nouveau driver. You can use Driver Manager to install proprietary drivers, currently mine is giving me the option of 331.38 or 304.117 -- or nouveau. I always download and install from the Nvidia site, however
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Message boards : Number crunching : Linux 64, Mint 17, and Nvidia 340.24 driver


 
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