Folding@home on raspberry pi

[zosman]

Hello people! 
 

New here but i'm trying to run folding@home on my raspberry pi (i run headless) and i can't quite figure out how to do this, so any advice would be much appreciated! 

 

Also, yes, i know a raspberry pi won't put out massive points, but, i still want to do it.

[Zoravar]

The RPi runs an ARM processor.  So the big question is, does F@H have an ARM client?  As far as I'm aware it doesn't.  But I believe BIONIC does (at least for some projects).

[Zoravar]

An untested idea I just had would be to install chrome or chromium on the RPi and do your folding in the web browser at nacl.foldingathome.org

[ItsBlck]

On 12/1/2018 at 3:19 AM, Zoravar said:

An untested idea I just had would be to install chrome or chromium on the RPi and do your folding in the web browser at nacl.foldingathome.org

Yes that should work I'm pretty sure since the chrome version of fah is pretty lightweight. Not entirely sure though. use boinc then

[BananaInSandals]

On 12/1/2018 at 11:19 AM, Zoravar said:

An untested idea I just had would be to install chrome or chromium on the RPi and do your folding in the web browser at nacl.foldingathome.org

Not sure what I've done wrong but it doesn't work. And I've tried to install the client for Debian/Ubuntu on it. The client was installed but it's stuck on "connecting". 

 

P.S. it's a pi 3b+.

[Zoravar]

I'm really sorry. I had forgotten about this thread, but didn't want to leave you hanging.

 

I did some digging and it looks like NaCl uses the chrome "Native Client" sandbox (hence NaCl).  It sounds like the the ARM version of chromium might not have that feature included in it.  You could try launching chromium from the command line with the following nacl flag attached:

--enable-nacl

If retrying F@H then works, you're golden.  But If that doesn't do it then the ARM version of chromium probably wasn't compiled with NaCl included. In which case, you would have to get the chromium source code, get the native client SDK, make a couple config changes to enable nacl, and recompile your own copy of chromium for arm. 

 

However, if it was as "simple" as that, I would think the devs would have enabled the feature in the public arm release. This leads me to believe that nacl likely (but it could be other reasons) has dependencies that aren't available on arm. 

 

What those are specifically and if there are any workarounds available, I'm not sure. That's would require actually pulling out the source code and starting to poke around/try things, which is a little deeper than I really want to go with it.  Long story short, you tried and it didn't work, so that might be the end of it.  Unless you're really ambitious and wanted to try your hand at some custom coding

 

P.S. If anyone else passing by this thread had more knowledge or other info I'm not aware of, I would be curious to learn more.

 

Second P.S.  You could also just run BOINC

Edited December 29, 2018 by Zoravar
P.S.

[Zoravar]

A side note to go along with my post above:

 

Here's a interesting bit of info I found on the Wikipedia page (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Native_Client)

 

Quote

On October 12, 2016, a comment on the Chromium issue tracker indicated that Google's Pepper and Native Client teams had been destaffed.^[8] On May 30, 2017, Google announced deprecation of PNaCl in favor of WebAssembly.^[9] Although initially Google planned to remove PNaCl in first quarter of 2018,^[9]the removal is currently planned in the second quarter of 2019 (except for Chrome Apps).^[10]

 

No idea what this might mean for F@H's NaCl client come Q2 next year.  Just something interesting I stumble upon while trying to research the RPi issue.