Topic: My quest for an energy efficient mining system has hit a road block (Read 1431 times)
Cool idea, contacting support is worth a try, what is the worst that can happen.
June 16, 2011, 03:14:11 PM
Hi Everyone,
I have come into some old VIA Epia M10000 motherboards which only consume 21 Watts of energy and have 1 PCI slot. I have been able to PXE boot this system without a hard drive running LTSP under one of my Ubuntu 64-bit mining servers with all the ATI OpenCL SDK and fgrlx drivers installed on the 32-bit VIA Epia M10000 image. I have also installed all the necessary Python and OpenCL software. I was able to use a PCI to PCIe X1 slot adapter and plug in an ATI HD Radeon 5830 which boots and is seen by the OS using aticonfig. My only roadbock seems to be that the VIA Epia M10000 CPU does not support the SSE2 and SSE3 instructions. That is where my problem begins. It appears that even though I only need GPU mining, AMD in their wisdom compiled the ATI Stream SDK using SSE3 instructions. When I try to run clinfo it gives me an illegal instruction. If I run the image from the 64-bit server in a chroot environment clinfo runs correctly so it definitely seems to be the VIA EPIA not liking the compiled version of the ATI Stream SDK. If anyone has any ideas I would appreciate it. I just wish there was an Open Source OpenCL I could compile without SSE3 and run against the ATI GPU. I highly doubt that if I wasted my time and put in a support call to AMD they would recompile the ATI Stream OpenCL SDK for the Epia CPUs anytime in my lifetime.
-Dukejer
I have come into some old VIA Epia M10000 motherboards which only consume 21 Watts of energy and have 1 PCI slot. I have been able to PXE boot this system without a hard drive running LTSP under one of my Ubuntu 64-bit mining servers with all the ATI OpenCL SDK and fgrlx drivers installed on the 32-bit VIA Epia M10000 image. I have also installed all the necessary Python and OpenCL software. I was able to use a PCI to PCIe X1 slot adapter and plug in an ATI HD Radeon 5830 which boots and is seen by the OS using aticonfig. My only roadbock seems to be that the VIA Epia M10000 CPU does not support the SSE2 and SSE3 instructions. That is where my problem begins. It appears that even though I only need GPU mining, AMD in their wisdom compiled the ATI Stream SDK using SSE3 instructions. When I try to run clinfo it gives me an illegal instruction. If I run the image from the 64-bit server in a chroot environment clinfo runs correctly so it definitely seems to be the VIA EPIA not liking the compiled version of the ATI Stream SDK. If anyone has any ideas I would appreciate it. I just wish there was an Open Source OpenCL I could compile without SSE3 and run against the ATI GPU. I highly doubt that if I wasted my time and put in a support call to AMD they would recompile the ATI Stream OpenCL SDK for the Epia CPUs anytime in my lifetime.
-Dukejer
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