Suggestion to improve default configuration for boinc-client

Arno Lehmann al at its-lehmann.de
Thu May 11 03:51:45 BST 2023


Hi there,

after struggling a bit with the boinc clint and PrimeGrid work units 
under Debian 12, I found a piece of configuration that might deserve a 
different handling in the Debian package.

To provide a tiny bit of context -- I want to use a recent Radeon GPU. 
The Debian-provided Mesa OpenCL stack does not work with my card, so I 
installed the AMD-provided one, which is based upon the ROCm stack of 
AMD. I could see the PrimeGrid software, through the boinc client, work 
only if I ran boinc from the shell, not under systemd.

The resolution of this was to disable a bit of the strict security 
hardening of the systemd service unit by putting

ProtectSystem=full


It appears to me that the need to locally compile and run software is 
kind of common with OpenCL, and that OpenCL is kind of common with boinc 
applications. Thus, I would appreciate if the default unit file adapted 
accordingly, or the (potential) problem alongside its resolution was 
mentioned in /usr/share/doc/boinc-client/README.Debian.gz and the Wiki 
page at https://wiki.debian.org/BOINC (which might need an overhaul, I 
think)


This is with
root at Zwerg:~# apt show boinc-client
Package: boinc-client
Version: 7.20.5+dfsg-1.1


A bit more context:
https://github.com/BOINC/boinc/issues/4948
https://www.primegrid.com/forum_thread.php?id=10048
debian-user list mail Message-ID: 
<717ce11e-a97c-77c8-8f2e-3a36d5bdeea5 at its-lehmann.de>

Thanks for your work supporting Debian users!

Cheers,

Arno

-- 
Arno Lehmann

IT-Service Lehmann
Sandstr. 6, 49080 Osnabrück



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