[Pkg-bitcoin-devel] BFGminer and OpenCL/GPU/CPU mining

[Dmitry Smirnov]

On Thursday, 28 April 2016 4:47:16 PM AEST Raphaël Halimi wrote:
> I write to this mailing list as a last resort because after a whole day
> of trial and error, I couldn't make BFGminer work.
> [...] 
> I tried several combinations of mesa-opencl-icd/amd-opencl-icd and
> ocl-icd-libopencl1/amd-libopencl1, with or without "-S opencl:auuto";
> nothing worked. Despite the fact that clinfo properly reports my
> hardware (the Phenom CPU with amd-opencl-icd, and the Turks GPU with
> mesa-opencl-icd), BFGminer still won't report anything else than "0 GPU
> devices max detected".
> 
> The README states that to mine with the free drivers, the binary needs
> llvm, clang, libclc and mesa (not clarifying if they're needed at
> build-time or run-time); I tried to recompile the package with these, to
> no avail (it seems they're not even detected by the configure script).
> [...]
> I don't understand either why the Debian package description advertises
> GPU mining, whereas llvm/clang/libclc/mesa are not listed in
> build-depends (or in recommends, if needed at run-time) while the README
> states they're needed for free GPU mining.
> 
> I admit I'm at a lost here, I don't know what to do next. Any help would
> be appreciated.

I've never managed to make GPU mining work with Mesa drivers. I think 
upstream is not saying something or maybe it hasn't been tried with Debian 
drivers. Last time when I had a look, Mesa needed root privileges for OpenCL 
computations and that alone turned me down. I hope this problem was addressed 
but I've never had time to try again.

GPU mining works (or at least used to work) with Fglrx drivers. Please 
remember to 

	sudo update-alternatives --config glx

in order to select/check correct GLX.

I agree with you that even if GPU mining is not practical it is not worthless 
and still make sense for various reasons like ones you've mentioned.

-- 
Best wishes,
 Dmitry Smirnov
 GPG key : 4096R/53968D1B

---

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove
anything.
        -- Friedrich Nietzsche
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