It's enough to make a guy want to set up a virtual machine
It seems that I've gone and inconvenienced myself for a hobby.
Somewhere, something necessary for Folding@Home's high performance GPU client causes my display driver to crash. Is it the client? The molecular simulation the client runs and monitors? AMD's Compute Abstraction Layer libraries? The drivers themselves? The hardware? Unfortunately, I haven't been able to track down a cause. F@H's and the operating system's logs aren't any help and the most FahMon will tell me is that the thing "hung". Thanks, I knew that one.
Now, just because I haven't tracked down a cause, doesn't mean I don't have a solution. As long as I only GPU-Fold when I'm not doing anything else, even leaving a browser window open with a page to read later, the machine will behave itself. Trust me, I've been pretty exhaustive in my messing around and testing the limits of this problem. This is what works. It kind of goes against the "use idle resources" philosophy of distributed computing, and it means I can't leave Pidgin open all the time, but Anyway, other than leaving no trace, it's a surprisingly graceful failure. Or maybe, "it's a surprisingly graceful failure since it leaves no trace besides a blank monitor." Anything else my computer happens to be working on goes right on trucking, with just a little hiccup at the time of the display crash.
Elsewhere on the computing front, my neighbor is hella-impressed with how fast Puppy Linux is. It didn't load his network settings after booting up, though, and I'm almost sure I told it to. It's the second (and lesser) suspicious thing that's happened while working with Linux on this machine; I hope it's the last. I'm still not sure how I feel about throwing the guy into the waters of desktop Linux, but there really aren't a lot of options out there for an 8 year old computer that wasn't fast 8 years ago.
Somewhere, something necessary for Folding@Home's high performance GPU client causes my display driver to crash. Is it the client? The molecular simulation the client runs and monitors? AMD's Compute Abstraction Layer libraries? The drivers themselves? The hardware? Unfortunately, I haven't been able to track down a cause. F@H's and the operating system's logs aren't any help and the most FahMon will tell me is that the thing "hung". Thanks, I knew that one.
Now, just because I haven't tracked down a cause, doesn't mean I don't have a solution. As long as I only GPU-Fold when I'm not doing anything else, even leaving a browser window open with a page to read later, the machine will behave itself. Trust me, I've been pretty exhaustive in my messing around and testing the limits of this problem. This is what works. It kind of goes against the "use idle resources" philosophy of distributed computing, and it means I can't leave Pidgin open all the time, but Anyway, other than leaving no trace, it's a surprisingly graceful failure. Or maybe, "it's a surprisingly graceful failure since it leaves no trace besides a blank monitor." Anything else my computer happens to be working on goes right on trucking, with just a little hiccup at the time of the display crash.
Elsewhere on the computing front, my neighbor is hella-impressed with how fast Puppy Linux is. It didn't load his network settings after booting up, though, and I'm almost sure I told it to. It's the second (and lesser) suspicious thing that's happened while working with Linux on this machine; I hope it's the last. I'm still not sure how I feel about throwing the guy into the waters of desktop Linux, but there really aren't a lot of options out there for an 8 year old computer that wasn't fast 8 years ago.