Folding@Home on Linux with AMD GPU

[Llewen]

This thread can be deleted.  I ran into some issues after a kernel upgrade and was unable to get this working again.  I will repost if and when I figure this out.  Apologies for the fuss...

[Windows7ge]

I can't vouch for F@H but I assume like BOINC it likely relies on OpenCL.

 

The claim on Debian distros at least is all you need is the OpenCL component which can be acquired through the ROCm github repo. This never worked for me ever through multiple attempts.

 

As you've stated though yes. Installing the official display driver for Ubuntu 20.04.4 through the AMD website gives the OS the OpenCL component and works fine and dandy.

 

Information on this topic really is scarce. I had to scour many websites and forums and do my own experimentation for days or weeks to finally find something that worked. How to make it work on other distros is a whole other monster I haven't even explored myself.

[Llewen]

OP edited and completed.

[Llewen]

It's worth noting that my brother has burned up, I think, multiple laptops running FAH, so be warned.  The "<power v='FULL'/> " line can be dangerous.  You might want to change that to something less demanding if you don't have robust cooling for your system.  The safer options would be "MEDIUM" and "LIGHT".

edit:  This has been added to the OP.

Edited June 8, 2022 by Llewen
Warning about running FAH at "FULL" power.

[Llewen]

2 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

The claim on Debian distros at least is all you need is the OpenCL component which can be acquired through the ROCm github repo. This never worked for me ever through multiple attempts.

I'm a huge fan of Debian.  I've been using it for decades, and it was my distro of choice when I finally migrated all the PC's at home to Linux.  But some of the advice on pages such as the following is annoying and misleading:

https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian

If you follow the advice on that page strictly you will severely limit your software options.  Say goodbye to gaming on wine, for the most part, and to some of the highest quality software available for Linux, software such as Lutris, REAPER, QMPlay2, and so many other packages and apps.

Certainly you want to avoid dodgy repos as much as possible, and be careful how you install software, and especially drivers and system apps, from sources outside the Debian "ecosystem", but if you want to actually use your PC as your primary system, get things done, and have fun, drawing from sources outside that ecosystem is entirely unavoidable, and some of the advice on that page is just flat out bad advice.

[Llewen]

OP edited yet again.  I forgot a step.  The latest AMD OpenCL drivers will not install with the default Debian kernels available from the Debian ecosystem.

[Windows7ge]

19 minutes ago, Llewen said:

I'm a huge fan of Debian.  I've been using it for decades, and it was my distro of choice when I finally migrated all the PC's at home to Linux.  But some of the advice on pages such as the following is annoying and misleading:

https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian

If you follow the advice on that page strictly you will severely limit your software options.  Say goodbye to gaming on wine, for the most part, and to some of the highest quality software available for Linux, software such as Lutris, REAPER, QMPlay2, and so many other packages and apps.

Certainly you want to avoid dodgy repos as much as possible, and be careful how you install software, and especially drivers and system apps, from sources outside the Debian "ecosystem", but if you want to actually use your PC as your primary system, get things done, and have fun, drawing from sources outside that ecosystem is entirely unavoidable, and some of the advice on that page is just flat out bad advice.

I don't have decades of Linux experience under my belt. I'm probably closer to 5~6 years of mostly Debian but I've been having fun exploring UNIX more specifically FreeBSD.

 

From my relatively limited time on Debian I wholeheartedly agree. Staying in the official repos may keep the system more stable and safe but it will cripple the systems potential depending on what you're looking to accomplish. I've gone on a number of obscure adventures seeing what I can make Linux do. Some things panned out thinking outside the box. Some did not, and the severe lack of available documentation on some of these topics is to blame. Meaning your only guide is what you know and your willingness to trial & error to success. 

 

For example. Tell me how to setup a functioning iPXE server for Linux clients. Show me where there's any good documentation on the process.

[Llewen]

2 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

From my relatively limited time on Debian I wholeheartedly agree. Staying in the official repos may keep the system more stable and safe but it will cripple the systems potential depending on what you're looking to accomplish. I've gone on a number of obscure adventures seeing what I can make Linux do. Some things panned out thinking outside the box. Some did not, and the severe lack of available documentation on some of these topics is to blame. Meaning your only guide is what you know and your willingness to trial & error to success.

Absolutely the single greatest barrier to adoption for Linux is the lack of up to date, accurate information, anywhere, and "man [whatever]" is rarely accessible, understandable, or helpful to anyone who doesn't already have a lot experience with Linux and preferably some kind of IT related degree.

That problem was exactly why I wrote the OP in this thread.  Hopefully someone will find it useful.

One thing I have learned to do whenever googling for Linux related information is to add the year to the search string, eg. "fah amd opencl 2022".  But even that doesn't consistently provide up to date, accurate and helpful information.

[Windows7ge]

4 minutes ago, Llewen said:

One thing I have learned to do whenever googling for Linux related information is to add the year to the search string, eg. "fah amd opencl 2022".  But even that doesn't consistently provide up to date, accurate and helpful information.

I hate it when seemingly mundane tasks don't have up-to-date information. They say Google is your friend. Yeah well where do I turn when Google doesn't have the answer? You might say the forums. Yeah well the forums are where Google took me and the answer someone got with the same question was from 2014 with a significantly older distribution that no longer works on the current version or all I find is thread after thread of people who never got their question answered.

 

I really wonder sometimes if the overwhelming abundance of software that comprises GNU/Linux is really just a massive cluster of developers who seriously lack communication because only they seem to know how to use their own software and we're lucky if we can figure out the basics...

 

And don't even get me started on mixing software. To get iPXE working with poor or no documentation at all required me to mix dhcpd, ctld, , dnsmasq, inetd, and rsync over ssh, That was about a month long project I'm not even joking. It paid off in the end though and I'm actually blow away by the performance. It was well worth all the hassle.

[Llewen]

1 minute ago, Windows7ge said:

And don't even get me started on mixing software. To get iPXE working with poor or no documentation at all required me to mix dhcpd, ctld, , dnsmasq, inetd, and rsync over ssh, That was about a month long project I'm not even joking. It paid off in the end though and I'm actually blow away by the performance. It was well worth all the hassle.

I 100% agree with everything in the post of yours I've quoted, especially this last bit.  Once you get something working well on Linux, it is absolutely magical, and it tends to stay working for a long time, without a lot of additional fuss.  My first experience with Linux was Coyote, I used it to turn an old garbage business desktop into a router, and once I figured it out and got it working, it flat out blew me away.  This was around 2000.

I've had similar experiences when I moved my old game servers and web servers from Windows to Linux in 2002, and bought a retail router and put DD-WRT on it at about the same time, and most recently in 2018 migrated my personal home systems to Linux.  Every step has been frustration, a massive and steep learning curve, a ton of reading and googling, a lot of lost hair (good thing I have a lot of hair to lose), followed by, and this is not an exaggeration, wonder and joy.

I would never go back to Windows unless I had no choice, but Linux hasn't made falling in love with it easy.  Not by a long shot.

[Llewen]

19 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

I really wonder sometimes if the overwhelming abundance of software that comprises GNU/Linux is really just a massive cluster of developers who seriously lack communication because only they seem to know how to use their own software and we're lucky if we can figure out the basics...

 

• I've worked on software myself.  Creating documentation, especially for new users, is the most time consuming, frustrating and annoying part of the entire process.  Writing the code is fun.  Figuring out and solving problems with code is fun.  Creating documentation and keeping it up to date is absolutely not fun.
   
• Linux is mostly free software.
   
• The market share for the Linux desktop is a very small slice of the overall pie.
   
• The most popular Linux software is under constant, rapid, development, keeping the documentation in line with the latest developments is not an easy job.

I think those four factors are the primary reasons why accurate, up to date information for Linux software can be a real bear to find.

[Windows7ge]

16 minutes ago, Llewen said:

I would never go back to Windows unless I had no choice, but Linux hasn't made falling in love with it easy.  Not by a long shot.

For most of my current needs I have everything working exactly how I need it and rarely does anything break. Which is lovely compared to similar attempts with Windows. I am however always finding new things I want to explore which is always uncharted territory for myself. For example right now I'm interested in seeing if I buy a AMD Radeon PRO W6400 can I pass that to a Windows VM on PROXMOX and use PARSEC to remote into it with HEVC/H.265 hardware encoding?

 

Traditionally people would rely on NVIDIA NVENC but this is an issue for me for several reasons and I want to see what AMD has to offer as my research says their last series of PRO cards like the WX3200 didn't support hardware encoding at all. 

[Llewen]

Just about the only thing I've found that doesn't work as well as it did for me on Windows, if not far better, is multi-gpu support.  For that reason alone most of my games don't get as high frame rates on Linux.  In every other way that I can think of Linux has been superior.  Wayland has been advancing at light speed in 2022, it will be interesting to see if that will now change.  It's so close to being ready to fully replace X11, even on Debian Stable, that I can almost taste it.

I think my last remaining show stopper is the lack of any way to ensure that windows will open in a specific size and screen placement.  I have multiple monitors and that is important to me.

[Windows7ge]

1 hour ago, Llewen said:

Just about the only thing I've found that doesn't work as well as it did for me on Windows, if not far better, is multi-gpu support.  For that reason alone most of my games don't get as high frame rates on Linux.  In every other way that I can think of Linux has been superior.  Wayland has been advancing at light speed in 2022, it will be interesting to see if that will now change.  It's so close to being ready to fully replace X11, even on Debian Stable, that I can almost taste it.

Then it must be a good thing that for the past few generations of cards made by both AMD & NVIDIA Multi-GPU in the gamer space is basically dead. Neither manufacturer supports it any longer outside workstation/datacenter applications and those are cards with multi-thousand dollar price tags. It also has to be put into consideration that the games have to be optimized to leverage Multi-GPU and most really didn't when Multi-GPU was popular and they don't now. The current modern gamer space by both manufacturers and game developers has been pushed down the single GPU path so with a modern card your gaming experience should be fine. Are you familiar with Wendel from Level1Techs? He has a multitude of videos discussing and going over gaming on Linux and the best performing cards.

 

1 hour ago, Llewen said:

I think my last remaining show stopper is the lack of any way to ensure that windows will open in a specific size and screen placement.  I have multiple monitors and that is important to me.

Windows the OS or application windows? I can attest to multiple displays making that annoying on Linux. Windows usually remembers where you last opened a window but Linux seems to drop it anywhere every time and with multiple displays it complicates things further. Annoying. I know your pain.

[Llewen]

51 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

Then it must be a good thing that for the past few generations of cards made by both AMD & NVIDIA Multi-GPU in the gamer space is basically dead. Neither manufacturer supports it any longer outside workstation/datacenter applications and those are cards with multi-thousand dollar price tags. It also has to be put into consideration that the games have to be optimized to leverage Multi-GPU and most really didn't when Multi-GPU was popular and they don't now. The current modern gamer space by both manufacturers and game developers has been pushed down the single GPU path so with a modern card your gaming experience should be fine. Are you familiar with Wendel from Level1Techs? He has a multitude of videos discussing and going over gaming on Linux and the best performing cards.

 

Windows the OS or application windows? I can attest to multiple displays making that annoying on Linux. Windows usually remembers where you last opened a window but Linux seems to drop it anywhere every time and with multiple displays it complicates things further. Annoying. I know your pain.

Right, I'm a bit out of the loop.  So it's just the old benchmarks I'm using that are coded to take advantage of multiple gpu's, but the games aren't.  That doesn't surprise me.

And yes, that's lower case "w"indows.  KDE Plasma under X11/kwin has excellent support for multiple displays and you can save the locations of specific windows or applications.  I'm waiting for the wayland packages to honour those configurations.  If that doesn't happen then it will need to be replaced by some other system that does the same thing, or I will not be a happy camper.

[Windows7ge]

18 minutes ago, Llewen said:

Right, I'm a bit out of the loop.  So it's just the old benchmarks I'm using that are coded to take advantage of multiple gpu's, but the games aren't.  That doesn't surprise me.

And yes, that's lower case "w"indows.  KDE Plasma under X11/kwin has excellent support for multiple displays and you can save the locations of specific windows or applications.  I'm waiting for the wayland packages to honour those configurations.  If that doesn't happen then it will need to be replaced by some other system that does the same thing, or I will not be a happy camper.

I'm out of the gaming loop but I kept up with the hardware aspect of it. Last game I remember where it really could leverage multiple GPU's was the ever so popular Crysis 3, It seemed like a downwards slope after that. I remember having two Radeon HD 7970s in CFX and having to O.C. my 3930K to 4.2GHz or higher because it became the bottleneck. But yeah single powerful GPU has become the standard unfortunately but given the GPU shortages and price hikes it's more economical anyways. I loved the physical aesthetic of two GPUs. Today it does leave me with the option of installing a 40Gbe NIC in my desktop though.

 

Wayland is something I'm still too naive about to comment. I don't fully understand what it is though I've heard and seen it mentioned for a very long time. Personally I'm a Ubuntu pleb. I run a Linux hypervisor to suit all of my server needs under Ubuntu Server and anything it can't do I so far found works on UNIX (FreeBSD). As for the front-end I just use the default but I know I could install another more advanced UI if I wanted.

[Llewen]

Ubuntu is a fantastic distro and there are good reasons for it being the most popular.  I use Debian, in part because it gives me relatively easy access to Ubuntu repos, with a development cycle I understand better and am more comfortable with.  But if anyone expresses an interest in Linux and is looking for advice on which distro to choose, I always recommend Ubuntu.  It is relatively accessible, user friendly, and any Linux software worth running will provide an Ubuntu package.

[Llewen]

Ok I'm going to be editing the OP once again.  Turns out there are issues with dkms and upgrading liquorix kernels.  So at this point the only solution I have is to run amdgpu-uninstall, then purge amdgpu-install, then upgrade your kernel, reboot with the new kernel, and reinstall amdgpu-install and then run the commands to reinstall OpenCL again.  A major PITA, but there it is...

[Llewen]

Well, after a frustrating two days I'm going to delete the OP, save it somewhere, and post it again if and when I figure it out.  Stay tuned.

[Llewen]

I was able to get it all working again by going back to an older version of the AMD drivers, but I'm unable to repost the instructions because I don't know where to find those particular drivers on the AMD site anymore.  Sooooo, proprietary AMD drivers, we salute you!  ..I.

Thank you AMD for making everything related to Linux even more needlessly complex and frustrating...

[Gorgon]

14 hours ago, Llewen said:

I was able to get it all working again by going back to an older version of the AMD drivers, but I'm unable to repost the instructions because I don't know where to find those particular drivers on the AMD site anymore.  Sooooo, proprietary AMD drivers, we salute you!  ..I.

Thank you AMD for making everything related to Linux even more needlessly complex and frustrating...

LOL - I gave up on AMD GPUs after beating my head against the wall getting a pair of RX5700XTs working under Ubuntu and then having them break soon after a later update. I primarily use GPUs for F@H so I just gave the 5700XTs to the kid's for their Gaming PCs and never looked back.

 

Don't get me wrong, I love AMD and have been using their GPUs since the early days (Think ATI Rage 64s) and my Daily Driver has a RadeonPro W4100 for Display out but NVidia's proprietary drivers suck much much less than AMDs and CUDA vastly out-performs OpenGL on AMD GPUs for Folding so it's really a no-brainer.

 

Aside from a bad decision i9-9900K the only Intel CPUs I have are a couple of e3 Xeons, one in my NAS and the other idle. All the rest of my CPUs are Ryzen now - Intel just can't touch AMD these days when you look at efficiency even with all their fancy 12th gen P-core E-core obfuscation.

 

But typical AMD - put out great products then don't spend the effort on getting the drivers stable and performant.