Anyone run native Linux F@H clients?

[lowfat]

Thinking about installing Linux on my second machine here. However I can't seem to find any Linux GPU clients. Is there a way to run a VM client and get the cards folding through a windows environment?

[Dead Things]

There is no officially support Linux GPU client, and in all likelihood, there never will be. However, there is user-developed support for running the Win GPU client under WINE. You can learn more about it in the subforum at foldingforum: Folding Forum • View forum - unOfficial Linux GPU (WINE wrapper) (3rd party support)

Unfortunately, you can't run the GPU client inside a VM because the VMware drivers don't support it. Again, most likely a "never will" scenario.

Note that native Linux SMP performance is quite a bit better than VM'ing it. But, even though the GPU/WINE combo only uses about 10% of a CPU core, for some reason it wrecks havoc on the kernel scheduling when run in combination with the SMP client, causing huge slowdowns for both. So, if running both SMP and GPU simultaneously, VM'ing the SMP client is really your only option I'm afraid.

That's why so many of us are hoping that SMP2 for Windows is going to be as good or better than the current Linux client.

[zoob]

I switched my main rig to a Hackintosh and have been running F@H native with -bigadv -smp 8.. working well though the odd time it lags my system a little.

[Zero82z]

I run native Linux on my secondary PC with an SMP client and a GPU client under WINE. For a time I was running 3 GPU clients under WINE in that box. There is a bit of overhead from using WINE, but aside from that there wasn't a significant drop in performance as far as the GPU clients were concerned. The SMP client did drop in PPD, although that box is running a dual-core CPU, and I suspect the impact would be much smaller on a multi-core box.

However, the only reason that box is running native Linux is because the CPU does not support VT-x. I would favour a native Windows install running a Linux VM over a Linux install with GPU clients running under WINE.

[lowfat]

Well poo. I have too many GPU's to fit in a single machine. So it looks like I'll be VM'ing it for now.

[phil3_66666]

Originally Posted by lowfat

Well poo. I have too many GPU's to fit in a single machine. So it looks like I'll be VM'ing it for now.

Solution??

give me the gpu