StarTools

Hi,
Should StarTools GPU run with the Nouveau driver? I can get it to run with the Nvidia binary driver but this causes other system problems for me. When running the Nouveau driver the application exits immediately with no message of logs that I can find. Is this expected behaviour?
Thanks
Ed

Hi Ed,

Any driver you use, needs to expose OpenCL functionality. I don't believe Nouveau does that, sadly.
You can double check whether your current driver does so by running 'clinfo'.

Alternatively, you can run the non-GPU version, but you may be missing out on some pretty dramatic performance improvements.

Hope this is useful!

Thanks Ivo

Aaack LuckyEddie,

I'm about to build a new Kubuntu box with an ASUS GeForce RTX 3070 KO video board. What sort of problems are you seeing
with the Nvidia drivers?

Thanks,
Jack

Hi Jack,
Nvidia generally just doesn't support Linux properly. The basics on the most mainstream hardware are generally OK but it's always a fight. My current problems are with running Linux Mint on an old (2012) MacBook Pro. The external monitor is detected but nothing shown, UI scaling is flakey, backlight brightness doesn't work out-of-the-box.
Personally, if I were to build a new Linux box I would go AMD all the way.

Thanks Ed,

I am using that GPU because of the number of cores for things like Startools and PI (future). The reason for rebuilding my 2012 Intel i7 based openSuse box is that current linux kernels no longer seem to support that vintage of intel i7 based GPU. I have to wonder if your older Mac may be in a similar boat.

I will see if the AMD video cards can deal with massively parallel GPU apps.

Thanks,
Jack