State of F@H and Linux vs Win10 vs Nvidia vs AMD

[Audioaficionado]

I've just been letting my two old HD7870 just crank out 160kPPD and help heat my bedroom. I've acquired my son's old Nvidia GTX780 for folding purposes. How does the AMD RX580 stack up? How is the Linux F@H GPU support for both Nvidia and AMD.

 

[Alaric]

The RX 580 should stomp all over the 780 for compute work. They were going for $1000+ at the height of the last mining boom. AMD cards are the cards of choice for that. I'm not familiar with folding needs, so I could be all wet here. That's my disclaimer and my $.02. LOL

 

[Audioaficionado]

Did FAH Stanford ever get a Linux client for AMD? I'm getting weary of Winten as my daily OS.

T32 only has 62 active folders ?!! Is FAH dying or just moved off the home folders?

 

[JLK03F150]

I could never find a Linux driver for my HD 6850's, but one of them is folding on Win7 now. The other one keeps crashing so I took it out of service.

I think some folders have moved to various CureCoin folding teams to try a recoup a portion of their power bills. It can be done while staying on T32, but I never went through all of the setup process.

I have 3 GTX 970s & 1 RX 480, but all of them are currently down for various reasons and I don't have the time to focus on getting them all going again.

 

[don256us]

Did FAH Stanford ever get a Linux client for AMD? I'm getting weary of Winten as my daily OS.

T32 only has 62 active folders ?!! Is FAH dying or just moved off the home folders?

We are small, that's true but folding is still going strong. We've lost out to teams like EVGA and CureCoin who have offered some form of financial gain like discounts on video cards and plenty of hardware give-aways that EVGA can provide and the potential for riches by CureCoin prior to folding coin. We are small, that's true but we are still #4 in the world.

 

[Audioaficionado]

I'm looking at Linux gaming distros as they seem to have more propriety graphic card driver support than your straight distros. Maybe I can get some AMD GPU FAH support. Otherwise I'll have to figure out how to build a windows VM with direct graphics hardware pass through.

 

[ihrsetrdr]

I miss the days when you could set up folding in a minimal Linux environment...Dedicated folding boxen.

I loved to use notfred's live CD / Virtual Folding Appliance....https://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php/575446-notfred-s-Virtual-Folding-Appliance

 

[Audioaficionado]

Linux VMs worked great for CPU WUs as the CPU is by necessity passed through to the VM. You can get a GPU passed through into a VM, but it is much more complicated and that GPU won't be available to the host system.

 

[petteyg359]

I can CPU fold on Linux all day, but nothing I do will make the system detect the Vega FE as an OpenCL target

 

[Audioaficionado]

Too bad UNIX/BSD folding isn't supported. You can run lots of Linux apps natively in UNIX/BSD, but probably not the precision math operations needed by FAH. Close doesn't cut it.

 

[ihrsetrdr]

This is really old news, but:

FreeBSD can't run the SMP client because it can only run 32-bit Linux binaries, and the SMP cores are 64-bit.

https://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=44&t=15183&p=150651&hilit=freebsd#p150651

This was with the v6 client, which could do a single core folding WU. I miss v6.

 

[Audioaficionado]

I suppose they are working hard enough just keeping up with the most popular OS. BSD isn't used as much with the exception of Mac OS.