280.26 Nvidia drivers

[spingadus]

Haven't seen anyone mention this yet, so I'll be the first.

The 280.26 drivers have been out since 8/9. Late last night I decided to try updating from 275.33. It was nearly a nightmare, but it could have been my own fault.

I downloaded the update and put boinc on suspend. Perhaps this was a no-no and maybe I should have just exited from Boinc, I don't know. Once the update was complete I was not able to connect to Boinc from the manager. Even a reboot did not help. Boinc manager just sat there trying to connect forever. Occasionally, I would click the 'cancel' button on the dialog popup box and it would show my tasks, but the project tab was empty. The tasks were not crunching and I could verify it with the task manager. I tried reinstalling Boinc, but that did nothing. I then reinstalled 275.33. Strangely the problem still persisted. I thought grimly that I may have borked all of my tasks, including a 100+ hour PG SOB task. If you could have seen my face at that moment you would have felt pity. But, I decided to try random things and killed the ever present Freehal processes and suddenly Boinc started working.

The moral of this story is that I don't know what went wrong. Perhaps it was because I suspended Boinc during the upgrade. Maybe it was Freehal that was the problem. Either way, I went back to running with 275.33. I may even try to upgrade again. I'm curious if anyone else has tried to upgrade.

[DrPop]

Yeah, I would've suspended all my BOINC projects and exited BOINC completely first, but that's just me. On the other hand - you found a culprit. I'm about to kill Free-hal on all my rigs, because it has been hanging whenever I go to restart or shutdown any of them. Not sure that I like that, whatever it's doing. Not worth a couple thousand points per day to me, if it's screwing with my rigs.

[spingadus]

Yeah, I would've suspended all my BOINC projects and exited BOINC completely first, but that's just me. On the other hand - you found a culprit. I'm about to kill Free-hal on all my rigs, because it has been hanging whenever I go to restart or shutdown any of them. Not sure that I like that, whatever it's doing. Not worth a couple thousand points per day to me, if it's screwing with my rigs.

Yes, I've been debating whether to run Freehal or any of the other NCI tasks at all. I'm wondering how much they actually slow down both my cpu and gpu tasks. In a situation where the gpu is utilizing a cpu heavily, it may push it over the top and I will either lose a thread or my "high paying" gpu task takes longer. Losing 30 seconds to a normally 5 minute Rdistr task adds up to a lot of credit in 24 hours.

[DrPop]

I have to agree with you there. Nothing is free. (EDIT) What I mean, is there must be some overhead in there, and I'll bet it's easily a wash if running a high paying GPU project & multiple GPUs in a box, if it even cuts off just a few seconds every hour that the system must wait for your CPU to feed the GPU, etc. Hmmm...I'm not the one to go test it all out and give you times and stuff, but I will try it out and see if my rigs feel a little more "snappy" or less "sluggish" or anything that I can report back.

[Mr. Hankey]

I just upgraded my dual gtx570 box. I was hoping that would let me use the cuda 32 app over on distrgen. I exited boinc completely and did the install no issue boinc started up fine and distrgen is cranking out the tasks.

[spingadus]

I just upgraded my dual gtx570 box. I was hoping that would let me use the cuda 32 app over on distrgen. I exited boinc completely and did the install no issue boinc started up fine and distrgen is cranking out the tasks.

Ok cool. That mademe feel more confident in re-installing again.

... upgrade completed...

No problems, running fine.


p.s. I was not running freehal btw.

[Mr. Hankey]

Ok cool. That mademe feel more confident in re-installing again.

... upgrade completed...

No problems, running fine.


p.s. I was not running freehal btw.

as a note, I run freehall and wuprop on all of my supported boxes. I typically run 1 freehal unit per thread on the box so my i7 runs 8 of them

[spingadus]

I guess I'll never know what actually went wrong. That's ok, I'm happy that it's working.

[Slicker]

On DistrRTgen, I had to turn off crunching on one CPU in order to hit max credit -- even with the new version of the CUDA app they released. The only problem now is that my CUDA card now shows the screen in a strange green color. I also had to upgrade to the latest nVidia drivers because my box kept setting the speed to idle speeds even when crunching when running the 275 version. The 280 fixed that, but now the screen is green. The monitor is hooked up to a KVM and looks fine from the other boxes, so I know it isn't the monitor. Haven't tried the KVM yet, but I'm guessing the problem is the GPU and/or driver.

[DrPop]

Hmmm...that does not sound fun. Sorry to hear that (the green issue). I also had to drop a core for DiRT and a core for Moo! on DrPop, and one core for DiRT on KAT, but my RAC went up quite nicely once I did.