Release Notes for BOINC 7.2

From BOINC

Version 7.2.39 of BOINC was released for general public use on 28 January 2014.

Previous version: release notes for version 7.0.

Changes in 7.2.42

  • Fix problem that was causing scheduler RPCs to fail on Yoyo@home (HTTP status code 400)

Changes in 7.2.39

  • Updated Translations.
  • Various changes to CPU and GPU scheduling and work-fetch.

Changes in 7.2.33

Changes in 7.2.31

  • Windows/Mac/Linux: Disable downloading of images in notices; it was crashing the Manager.

Changes in 7.2.28

  • Updated Translations.
  • OpenCL support for Intel and AMD CPUs.
  • Add new AMD GPU descriptions.
  • Add new Windows version descriptions.
  • Various changes to CPU and GPU scheduling and work-fetch.
  • Support for HTTPS URLs in notices.
  • Windows: Fix for running VirtualBox VMs when installed as a service.

Changes in 7.2.15

  • Android: Updated Translations.
  • Android: Fix device name issues.

Changes in 7.2.9

  • Android: Initial release.

OpenCL support for CPU

BOINC 7.2 has OpenCL support for CPUs, but this does require that you install OpenCL drivers for your CPU.

Windows

AMD has an OpenCL 1.2 driver available for any AMD CPU with SSE2 and later.
Get it from their download page. For stability reasons, you may not want to install the sample applications. They may destabilize your system.

Intel has an OpenCL 1.2 driver available for 3rd and 4th Generation Intel Core.
Top right corner of this page has the download links. A separate driver is available for 1st and 2nd Generation Intel Core CPUs, 32bit version here, 64bit version here.

Note: When you have an AMD HD 5XXX or higher, or FirePro GPU installed, with up-to-date Catalyst drivers, your CPU may already have OpenCL support enabled.
To test OpenCL support being enabled, see Determine OpenCL capability of GPU and CPU in the BOINC FAQs Wiki.

Linux

For Linux support, AMD requires a minimum of openSUSE 11.x, Ubuntu 11.04, or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.x for AMD OpenCL support on the CPU.
Intel requires a minimum of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for Intel OpenCL support on the CPU.

Note: It's possible that installing either CPU SDK will work on the other CPU brand as well.

Known Issues

The following issues are already known to the developers:

All platforms

VirtualBox 4.2.18, 4.3.0 or 4.3.2: You can use VirtualBox versions 4.2.18, 4.3.0 or 4.3.2 with BOINC 7.2.28 without any problems, as long as you do not use the Test4Theory project. This project has severe work-fetch problems with these versions of VirtualBox, and is therefore limiting itself to a maximum of 4.2.16 for the time being. This is also why the BOINC + VirtualBox installer includes the 4.2.16 version.

Linux

BOINC 7.2 incompatible with Fedora 14 & 15: Due to a problem with incompatible wxWidget build options BOINC 7.0 will not work on Fedora 14 & 15.
This cannot be fixed, due to a difference in how wxWidgets is compiled between Fedora Core and Ubuntu. Ubuntu is the platform BOINC is built on.

Windows

Service Installation, GPU detection and Windows XP: Due to problems with up-to-date GPU drivers causing BOINC to crash or hang, it was decided that for all versions of Windows the GPU detection will no longer work when BOINC is installed as a service. This may change in a future version, but only after the GPU manufacturers have adjusted their driver code. So even in Windows 2000 and XP you can now no longer install BOINC as a service yet still have it detect your GPU(s) and run work on it. This change is present since 6.12.38

BOINC 7.2 incompatible with Domain Controllers: The present range of BOINC 7 is incompatible with Domain Controllers, meaning that you cannot install it on your system if it is a DC. This is because the developers used the Local Account API's instead of the Global Account API's.

Install BOINC 5.10.45 instead, even though this doesn't support GPUs or multi-threading applications.

BOINC 5.10.45 32bit version
BOINC 5.10.45 64bit version

Known issues with BOINC 7.2.26 and Seti when updating from BOINC 7.0.28 or before and getting 197 (0xc5) EXIT_TIME_LIMIT_EXCEEDED errors on anonymous platform GPU: When you've updated to BOINC 7.2.26, coming from BOINC 7.0.28 or before, AND when crunching work on an anonymous platform GPU application (such as the ones from Lunatics), you have a good chance that all your work errs with a 197 (0xc5) EXIT_TIME_LIMIT_EXCEEDED error.

This is because of an addition to the code in BOINC 7.0.33, where when you run the anonymous platform and you have not supplied a flops value in your app_info.xml file, that the flops value used for GPU tasks is increased by a factor of 10.

It will only affect old work still in cache from before the upgrade. Any newer work your BOINC downloads, will not be affected.

Two ways to work around this:
1. Before you upgrade, set No New Tasks and run your cache empty. Report all. Then upgrade to the new version and set Allow New Tasks.
2. Done the upgrade with a full cache? Reset the project. This will throw away all present work in cache, but since the project has resend lost work available, your tasks will be resent to you and seen as new work.

Error 1069: Service cannot be started because of a faulty login:

This happens after something has removed the "Logon as a Service" from the "boinc_master" user account that was created during setup.

Known reasons for why this might happen:

  • The administrator for your network has specified which accounts are allowed to "Logon as a Service" via Group Policy. Any account not on that list is stripped of that user right.

Macintosh OS X

Nvidia CUDA support broken on OS X 10.9 (Mavericks): Depending on your Nvidia GPU, the CUDA drivers on Mavericks may not support it. This is due to Apple changing some things in the drivers for these models. Nvidia note this in their developer notes, and say it will be fixed soon. Despite their CUDA v5.5.28 drivers stating they support Mavericks, they actually do not.

BOINC ownership or properties are not set correctly: After you updated to Mavericks, you will need to reinstall BOINC to fix the permissions to groups and users. When you neglect to do so, you'll get the message BOINC ownership or permissions are not set properly; please reinstall BOINC. (Error Code - 1008), so just follow that advice and all will be well.

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