I have five machines running BOINC, two Macs running OS X and three PCs running FreeBSD. The Macs are running a mix of different projects; but the only one with native FreeBSD support is seti@home, which has been experiencing outages and delays.

I should be able to run the linux version of project binaries using FreeBSD's linux compatability layer. But most of the projects don't seem to have any published download URL for the science apps - they expect the boinc core client to do it. And so far, I haven't found any way to get the core client to ask for a specific app using i686-pc-linux-gnu instead of i386-portbld-freebsd6.0. I don't want to just change the value in client_state.xml because I prefer to use the FreeBSD native apps when they are available.

So my question, for someone familiar with the core client code, is: If I can get ahold of a linux client, and possibly manually edit some XML files, will the client use different platform names for different projects? (FreeBSD seems to be using client version 4.68, if that matters.)

---

So my question, for someone familiar with the core client code, is: If I can get ahold of a linux client, and possibly manually edit some XML files, will the client use different platform names for different projects?

Yes - you are using an "anonymous platform" and you'll need an "app_info.xml" file. You can search on these in the Wiki for more details. I would also suggest you get the Altivec-optimized Mac SETI application from Team MacNN and put it on your Macs - this will give you an example of the xml file needed, how to override the project's names, etc. Plus it'll double your SETI throughput on G4's and G5's. :-)

---

So my question, for someone familiar with the core client code, is: If I can get ahold of a linux client, and possibly manually edit some XML files, will the client use different platform names for different projects?

Yes - you are using an "anonymous platform" and you'll need an "app_info.xml" file. You can search on these in the Wiki for more details. I would also suggest you get the Altivec-optimized Mac SETI application from Team MacNN and put it on your Macs - this will give you an example of the xml file needed, how to override the project's names, etc. Plus it'll double your SETI throughput on G4's and G5's. :-)

Thanks for the pointer to the AltiVec-optimized Mac SETI app - I've installed it on one of the Macs; and will update the other in a couple of days.

So far, I haven't had any luck getting the linux E@H app to work with the FreeBSD native boinc client. I'm not yet sure whether the problem is the project's update to the albert client, which seems to have also ruled out the use of app_info.xml; or if the difficulty is caused by not tweaking all of the XML properly. The symptom is still the "platform 'i386-portbld-freebsd6.0' not found" message.

---

So far, I haven't had any luck getting the linux E@H app to work with the FreeBSD native boinc client. I'm not yet sure whether the problem is the project's update to the albert client, which seems to have also ruled out the use of app_info.xml; or if the difficulty is caused by not tweaking all of the XML properly. The symptom is still the "platform 'i386-portbld-freebsd6.0' not found" message.

I think I may have it working now. It looks like I may have stopped and restarted the boincmgr app but not the core client after setting up the app_info.xml file. Not that I've done that, it has started downloading.

And while I was typing the above, it finished the download and started crunching.


Thanks for the help!

(Now, I just need to squeeze out the time to bundle that up as a FreeBSD port to make it easy for others to do...)

---

Pat, glad to see you managed it.

A point may be worth to mention: if someone tries to run BOINC on a platform that is not supported by majority of projects, he/she might try as well to run BOINC which runs in emulated mode (as would science apps).

Another example of 'unsupported' platform is x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, which is actually 64-bit version of intel/AMD. Binaries for i386-pc-linux-gnu run rather well but if one compiles native 64-bit client and doesn't take care about platform identifier, he/she will end up with issues that any *BSD user is all too familiar with.

[edit] Spelling mistkaes [/edit]

---

Metod ...