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An update on my farm: I've modified all of my SMP machines (4 in total, all dual core), and indeed all of the notfred Linux boxes have improved their speed noticeably. The Linux client in a VM on my Opteron also seems to have improved a bit, but that thing is so variable it's often difficult to tell much, though it seems to have improved less than the others for whatever reason.

Anyway, thanks for bringing this to our attention.

Ragnar Dan wrote:

An update on my farm: I've modified all of my SMP machines (4 in total, all dual core), and indeed all of the notfred Linux boxes have improved their speed noticeably. The Linux client in a VM on my Opteron also seems to have improved a bit, but that thing is so variable it's often difficult to tell much, though it seems to have improved less than the others for whatever reason.

Anyway, thanks for bringing this to our attention.

By modified do you mean tear's fix or notfreds new version?

tear's fix. I haven't seen a new notfred's.

Ragnar Dan wrote:

tear's fix. I haven't seen a new notfred's.

The Linux client in a VM on my Opteron also seems to have improved a bit, but that thing is so variable it's often difficult to tell much, though it seems to have improved less than the others for whatever reason.

I have an old X2 6000+ and it did not respond to tear's fix as well as the Intel Duo's.

The new notfreds is a couple entries down.

Oh yes, I did read that. It has one thing which might be useful for me (the time change), but I probably won't burn a disc for it. It might be useful for a Win7 VM, though, and I can put it in there for use next time it crashes or has to be restarted. If I can find that site to turn things into the right stuff for VMware Player, anyway.

Ragnar Dan wrote:

If I can find that site to turn things into the right stuff for VMware Player, anyway.

EasyVMX?

Flying Fox wrote:

Ragnar Dan wrote:

If I can find that site to turn things into the right stuff for VMware Player, anyway.

EasyVMX?

Yeah that's it. Thanks.

Now the place has changed and I can't remember what I did to make it work for me last time. I also have to recall how much longer my Win 7 RC will keep working, since when it quits I'll have to find a new OS, and as good as Linux can be, and maybe people can run Wine to make GPU's fold, I'm still doubtful I can run RivaTuner under Wine (though maybe... I'm just doubtful).

Ragnar Dan wrote:

Now the place has changed and I can't remember what I did to make it work for me last time. I also have to recall how much longer my Win 7 RC will keep working, since when it quits I'll have to find a new OS, and as good as Linux can be, and maybe people can run Wine to make GPU's fold, I'm still doubtful I can run RivaTuner under Wine (though maybe... I'm just doubtful).

I played with Win 7 on a couple of my dedicated folding pc's and always end up back with XP. On both a dual core and quad core I experienced about a 11% penalty in smp performance with W7 compared to XP. I found it harder to set up and didn't particularly like the "improvements", so why stick with it if it's slower.

weedacres wrote:

Ragnar Dan wrote:

Now the place has changed and I can't remember what I did to make it work for me last time. I also have to recall how much longer my Win 7 RC will keep working, since when it quits I'll have to find a new OS, and as good as Linux can be, and maybe people can run Wine to make GPU's fold, I'm still doubtful I can run RivaTuner under Wine (though maybe... I'm just doubtful).

I played with Win 7 on a couple of my dedicated folding pc's and always end up back with XP. On both a dual core and quad core I experienced about a 11% penalty in smp performance with W7 compared to XP. I found it harder to set up and didn't particularly like the "improvements", so why stick with it if it's slower.

I have just upgraded to a VT capable processor so I'm going all the way to LinuxSMP. No need to care about XP/Vista/Win7 and all that WinSMP jazz.

Notfred: Thanks very much for the brilliant folding utilities. I've got 5 c2q's running some flavor of Notfred folding. If your folding suite was not available, I'm not sure I'd have the patience to use them to fold under windows.

I check every so often for new versions & recently noticed temp monitoring seems to have been added. My question is how to use this function. I've not been able to figure out how to extract CPU temperatures. I figure there is probably a user guide somewhere explaining how to do this but if there is I haven't found it. I do see the "Processor temperatures (Intel Core and AMD K8)" link when I browse to the IP of one of my "Diskless Folder" notfred SMP clients. However when I click the link, only "Core 0 Core 1" is displayed & no temp data is present... This is true of all my machines. I remember reading somewhere (probably on this board) that a "sensors" or "lmsensors" command might be all that is necessary to get the CPU to start spitting out core temp data... Is this something that must be manually entered from the linux command line ? If so, my syntax must be incorrect...

Can someone please provide instructions to activate the temp monitoring feature? And please talk slowly and e-nun-ciate for the stupid, linux challenged people such as myself. If there is a how-to guide already written, if you could kindly direct me to it I'd be very grateful.

Thanks again for the amazing folding tools.

nonymoussurfer wrote:

Notfred: Thanks very much for the brilliant folding utilities. I've got 5 c2q's running some flavor of Notfred folding. If your folding suite was not available, I'm not sure I'd have the patience to use them to fold under windows.

I check every so often for new versions & recently noticed temp monitoring seems to have been added. My question is how to use this function. I've not been able to figure out how to extract CPU temperatures. I figure there is probably a user guide somewhere explaining how to do this but if there is I haven't found it. I do see the "Processor temperatures (Intel Core and AMD K8)" link when I browse to the IP of one of my "Diskless Folder" notfred SMP clients. However when I click the link, only "Core 0 Core 1" is displayed & no temp data is present... This is true of all my machines. I remember reading somewhere (probably on this board) that a "sensors" or "lmsensors" command might be all that is necessary to get the CPU to start spitting out core temp data... Is this something that must be manually entered from the linux command line ? If so, my syntax must be incorrect...

Can someone please provide instructions to activate the temp monitoring feature? And please talk slowly and e-nun-ciate for the stupid, linux challenged people such as myself. If there is a how-to guide already written, if you could kindly direct me to it I'd be very grateful.

Thanks again for the amazing folding tools.

You're not alone. I have 6 notfreds running and can't get any of them to give temps. I also can not get the Kill folding cores to work. I have to manually to into Busybox and issue a killall.
Having said that notfreds is a great tool. I just wish notfred had more time to spend to smooth out the wrinkles.

The desire to monitor temps while folding isn't really an absolutely dire need. All my rigs have decent aftermarket cooling with arctic silver & I expect should keep core temps < 60C or therebouts. It'd just be nice to see this info. To close the loop if you will... No biggie though.

Are you running under a VM or booting via some other method (CD, USB, netboot?) I haven't checked under a VM but I suspect that the VM may not be making the temperature monitoring parts of the processor available to the guest OS. If you are running via one of the other methods then the C2Quads should have the sensors built in that I look for. It doesn't need lmsensors, it uses the "coretemp" module to read the sensors from the processor directly and then I read them from sysfs. It's the fact that it only finds 2 processors on a C2Q that makes me think you are running in a VM.

BTW all my diskless stuff is Open Source and GPL'd. If people have things that they can fix, I welcome diffs. I'm having problems at the moment though as I've moved up to Ubuntu 9.10 for my desktop and GLibC no longer builds. I need to get some time to send an email off the the GLibC folks.

notfred wrote:

Are you running under a VM or booting via some other method (CD, USB, netboot?) I haven't checked under a VM but I suspect that the VM may not be making the temperature monitoring parts of the processor available to the guest OS. If you are running via one of the other methods then the C2Quads should have the sensors built in that I look for. It doesn't need lmsensors, it uses the "coretemp" module to read the sensors from the processor directly and then I read them from sysfs. It's the fact that it only finds 2 processors on a C2Q that makes me think you are running in a VM.

BTW all my diskless stuff is Open Source and GPL'd. If people have things that they can fix, I welcome diffs. I'm having problems at the moment though as I've moved up to Ubuntu 9.10 for my desktop and GLibC no longer builds. I need to get some time to send an email off the the GLibC folks.

I'm running the VMware Appliance and what you say makes sense. I can monitor temps from the host with gpu-z.

C2Q's run just fine,, you just have to tell VM to use 4 cores which can be done on the new Player 3 or Workstation.

How about the Kill Folding Cores. I've never gotten that to work. I have to manually go into Busybox and issue a killall fah6.

Edit:

Seems to have worked it self out anyway, thats 2 more computers for the fold.

Hi notfred First of all, thanks for a great appliance!

Could you include the following functions in your appliances in the near future?
- add support for SCSI diskdrive? VMware ESX Server doesnt support IDE harddrive so i have to use Iso without backup.
- upgrade from 6.02 client to 6.24R3? (understandable if you dont since its beta, but it works fine. v6.23 i dont know much about)
- Make us able to configure it to configure -SMP 7 or -SMP 6?
- support -bigadv and enable/disable it from the configuration web?
- if bigadv support, autodownload the nessecary drop-in binary found at http://www.stanford.edu/~kasson/folding/linux/fah6
- if bidadv selected, assign 650MB of memory per x in -smp x chosen. But no less than 4600MB, Which is a proven minimum for bigadv.

EDIT:
But first of all, make a section for "computer hostname" in the ipconfig section

When will a new version with the new 6.29 folding client be available?

slugbug wrote:

When will a new version with the new 6.29 folding client be available?

Here has a mod version of Diskless that download the new version of fah (6.29b)...-bigadv too.

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1487953

Anyway... I'm using this until notfred out a new version.

Haven't checked on this in a while... but wanted to mention that I just downloaded the latest Notfred Folding ISO & was happy to find that processor core temps are reported with this latest ISO.

My folding endeavors have resulted in me having to infrequently replace a mobo or power supply to keep things running. As a result, I tend to acquire parts to the point I am able to "synergize" a new machine from spare parts (RMA'd mobos, etc.) once in awhile. I have had a fully assembled machine (with the exception of CPU) sitting silent & wasting space for several months (I forgot where I had rat-holed the spare CPU...). I was lucky enough to find not one but two CPUs yesterday so I plugged the best one into this box. Once I fired it up, lo & behold, I see processor core temperatures!

Thanks again Notfred for the awesome folding suite.

I assume the temp sensor(s) is the same between C2D & C2Q but in case it matters, this one's a C2D...

Hi folks, notfred ...


I'm trying to use the new version (my first time, btw) with a Dell Poweredge R510, that uses a Broadcom NetXtreme II network card..

I could notice on boot that the system can't find the bnx2 firmware file, and probably by this reason, can't use network and download the files...

I wondering if there is a way to add the firmware to CD (i can't use usb stick) or any other way.


Thanks in advance..

--Flavio

Broadcom is pulling some funny stuff with requiring firmware for the bnx2 driver. Supporting firmware loading is a pain and also there are potential copyright issues over distributing the firmware.

It's just way easier to go and put a proper NIC in there, I'd recommend the Intel ones, they're solidly supported and perform well.

Yeah... would be easy and nice but...

This server/model has no PCI slots, so to use an additional NIC I'll need to buy a PCI-Express card.. ;/

Well... I'll try to solve this some way or another. If I do it, I let you know

Thanks anyway

--

waKKu wrote:

Yeah... would be easy and nice but...

This server/model has no PCI slots, so to use an additional NIC I'll need to buy a PCI-Express card.. ;/

Well... I'll try to solve this some way or another. If I do it, I let you know

Thanks anyway

--

Don't know about you, but $30 does not sound too horrible?

I'm trying to run notfreds diskless folding from a windows server, but i keep getting a e100/d101s_ucode.bin error.

From my very limited knowledge of linux i believe its looking for a driver for the NIC. is there any way for me to provide the driver?

Thanks,
- Bochek


---- edit ----

Topics merged and PM sent to poster.

It's actually firmware for the NIC itself that is missing. You're best bet is to try to find a NIC that doesn't need firmware.

My notfreds VM crapped out last night after getting a bad WU and I was unable to wipe it in order to get back to folding. I decided to delete the VM and start from scratch. Configured everything and now I can't seem to get a WU. I think it's because the VM is using Folding@Home Client Version 6.02 and can't seem to DL Folding@Home Client Version 6.29 now. It was running fine before it got that bad WU last night

F@h apparently had some assignment server issues last night which caused bad WUs to be handed out.

Would it be possible to rebuild the kernel with older versions of the driver that do not request firmware images? I have a system that works fine with the 2.6.28.2 kernel (bnx2 1.8.1), but if I move to the latest kernel (2.6.30.1), the bnx2 driver requests the firmware, fails and leaves no network.

Or possibly give the method for creating the kernel[32|64] files so that people can build their own, and put the drivers that they need...

thanks
sjh

All the source code is freely available via SVN on SourceForge. See the project page at http://sourceforge.net/projects/foldingcd/ I use Ubuntu 9.10 x86_64 to build, haven't tried it out on Ubuntu 10.04 yet. I was doing some testing last night before doing a release and found a few issues that I need to fix before I release:
1) ntpd doesn't start - seems to want to be called with the full path.
2) syslinux fails to install - seems to not like the options nodev,noexec on the mount it does.
3) There seem to be 2 copies of backup.sh and check_hang.sh running at the same time - still looking at this.

Once I've got those done, I'll do a release and it has a new even later kernel, no idea if it still wants the firmware for that driver or not. It also includes an upgrade to the new client, but no support for bigadv yet.

Based on experimentation (and http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0901.1/00863.html) it looks like we need to enable CONFIG_FIRMWARE_IN_KERNEL http://cateee.net/lkddb/web-lkddb/FIRMWARE_IN_KERNEL.html. Since it does not seem the file system is up and running at the point the drivers are loading (tried to put the firmware files into the initrd image /lab/firmware, which proved no file system).

Once I enabled that kernel option and rebuilt the kernel my bnx2 driver (1.52.1-5) seems to load correctly (and it finds that the built in firmware is going to be used anyways... ), and everything seems to work.

It does make the kernel file about 600k larger than the .33 kernel I compiled originally, but that is only 400k larger than the .30 kernel file...

thanks
sjh

I did my builds on a Ubuntu 10.4 system.