Following hot on the heels of 6.10.5 we now have 6.10.6 released for windows. The unofficial change log from the BOINC message boards...

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Rom 18 September 2009
- client: if project-supplied backoff > 28 days, cap rather than ignore.

- client: don't print error message if output file with <copy_file> attribute is missing. That's the app's problem, not BOINC's

- client: fixed failure to initialize CPU backoff; leads to huge CPU backoff. Cap backoff when read statefile.

- client: oops, backoff time is absolute not relative

- client/API: add autosetup proxy info to init_data.xml

- client: in choosing coproc jobs to run (FIFO) give priority to whether job is already running. This addresses a bug where several jobs are returned by sched RPC, and one with a lexicographically greater name happens to finish downloading first.

- client: comment out [18942], which changed the meaning of "don't use GPUs while computer is in use" to "don't use GPUs running graphics apps while computer is in use" for NVIDIA GPUs. NVIDIA's API for seeing if a GPU is running a graphics app doesn't seem to reflect GPU use by the OS.

- client: fix bug introduced in [19035] that causes wrong nidle instances (and resulting work fetch problems).

- client (Unix): fix bug that caused GPU reservation to not work.
The problem: we were doing the reservation after the fork(), so that the data structure it changed was the app's, not the client's.

- client: don't print error msg if file is wrong size on startup

Oh and its got the same preempt cuda tasks bug as 6.10.4 and 5.

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BOINC blog

Here is the official change log:

Changes since 6.10.4:

- client: don't display processor cache if we don't know it.

- client: skip ATI detection stuff and error messages on Macs because ATI doesn't yet have a CAL library for Mac.

- Mgr: skip exit confirmation dialog if user pressed emergency Exit button on AsyncRPCDlg.

- Mac installer: ask user whether to allow non-administrative users to run and control BOINC.

- Mac installer: create a new command-line tool AddRemoveUser to add users to or remove users from group boinc_master. It also adjusts the users' login item and screensaver selection. Updated ReadMe file to explain changes for Unicode and for OS 10.6 Snow Leopard.

- client: add code for faking ATI GPUs

- client: cap time_stats dt at 2 weeks, so people upgrading to 6.10 won't get big drop in on_frac.

- client: fix bug in RR simulation: start only enough jobs to fill CPUs per project, not all the CPU jobs at once. I'm not sure how much difference this makes, but this is how it's supposed to work.

- client: if app_info.xml doesn't specify flops, use an estimate that takes GPUs into account.

- client: if it's been more than 2 weeks since time stats update, don't decay on_frac at all.

- client: save space in req msg. Didn't make much difference.

- client: in startup msgs, show resource shares, don't show prefs details

- client: fix bug in FIFO selection of coproc jobs (senility setting in?)

- client: add <fraction_done> to boinc_task_state.xml

- client: change order in poll loop so that:

1) job finishes

2) job gets marked as "ready to report"

3) scheduler RPC is initiated

Hopefully this won't have an unintended side-effect

- client: tweak policy for device busy time. Should eliminate some spurious "job won't complete by deadline" msgs.

- client and scheduler RPC: add optional <cpu_backoff>, <cuda_backoff>, and <ati_backoff> elements to scheduler reply. These specify backoffs for the resource types, overriding the existing backoff mechanism. Projects can supply these if they don't have apps of a particular type and don't want to get periodic requests for them.

- client: cap project-supplied backoffs at 28 days

- client: anal-retentive alphabetization



Changes since 6.10.5:

- client: if project-supplied backoff > 28 days, cap rather than ignore

- client: don't print error message if output file with <copy_file> attribute is missing. That's the app's problem, not BOINC's

- sample assimilator: if a canonical instance has no output files, rather than quitting create a file named WU_NAME_no_output_files

- client: fixed failure to initialize CPU backoff; leads to huge CPU backoff. Cap backoff when read statefile.

- client: oops, backoff time is absolute not relative

- client/API: add autosetup proxy info to init_data.xml

- client: in choosing coproc jobs to run (FIFO) give priority to whether job is already running. This addresses a bug where several jobs are returned by sched RPC, and one with a lexicographically greater name happens to finish downloading first.

- client: comment out [18942], which changed the meaning of "don't use GPUs while computer is in use" to "don't use GPUs running graphics apps while computer is in use" for NVIDIA GPUs.

NVIDIA's API for seeing if a GPU is running a graphics app doesn't seem to reflect GPU use by the OS.

- client: fix bug introduced in [19035] that causes wrong nidle instances (and resulting work fetch problems)

- client: don't print error msg if file is wrong size on startup

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BOINC blog

There are still scattered reports that too much work is being downloaded still and that the task being run are not correctly selected. The problem is that some of the people reporting these issues are so disgusted with UCB's reaction to bug reports that they are not interested in capturing the debug reports to hep in isolating the issues.

I was going to wait to try it myself because of the other multi-GPU project issue I reported (MW plus Collatz) where resource share is not respected properly.

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/download_all.php

linux versions are still 6.10.4 ...

Anyone running Fedora 11 is welcome to point at my "unofficial" repo for a 6.10.6 build.

rpm -ihv http://www.vacuumtube.org.uk/folding/fedora/11/x86_64/folding-release-1-3.noarch.rpm

And either ...

yum --enablerepo=folding-unstable install boinc-manager

or ...

yum --enablerepo=folding-unstable update boinc-manager

... depending on whether you already have boinc installed.

Anyone running Fedora 11 is welcome to point at my "unofficial" repo for a 6.10.6 build.

rpm -ihv http://www.vacuumtube.org.uk/folding/fedora/11/x86_64/folding-release-1-3.noarch.rpm

And either ...

yum --enablerepo=folding-unstable install boinc-manager

or ...

yum --enablerepo=folding-unstable update boinc-manager

... depending on whether you already have boinc installed.

may I "steal" and alien it? :-) rpm and deb are very similar

may I "steal" and alien it? :-) rpm and deb are very similar

Of course. The package spec is already "borrowed" from the default Fedora 6.6.36 version, with a couple of tweaks. (Usual proviso ... No warranty, no support and if it breaks you get to keep both pieces... ;)

I'm running 6.10.6 on 5 machines and I'm not seeing any crazy behaviour, eg. 500 tasks waiting to run, like I did with the earlier 6.10.* releases. But I'm also only crunching WCG and GPUGRID, so it hasn't had a lot of cross-project testing by me, anyway.

SRPM
http://www.vacuumtube.org.uk/folding/fedora/11/unstable/SRPMS/boinc-client-6.10.6-3.fc11.src.rpm

RPM's
http://www.vacuumtube.org.uk/folding/fedora/11/unstable/x86_64/boinc-client-6.10.6-3.fc11.x86_64.rpm
http://www.vacuumtube.org.uk/folding/fedora/11/unstable/x86_64/boinc-client-devel-6.10.6-3.fc11.x86_64.rpm
http://www.vacuumtube.org.uk/folding/fedora/11/unstable/x86_64/boinc-client-doc-6.10.6-3.fc11.noarch.rpm
http://www.vacuumtube.org.uk/folding/fedora/11/unstable/x86_64/boinc-manager-6.10.6-3.fc11.x86_64.rpm

I know nothing about alien. I hope it deals with the pre/post script stuff, like creating a boinc user and there is also the init script infrastructure - I'm not sure how different this is on Debian.

Thanks :-)

In fact, rpm and deb are very-very (diifers in location of some stuff, but alien carry it easily :-)

sorry bro - I did not steal 6.10.6 from you, just 2day this version appeared on Berkeley...

Its now superceeded. See seperate BOINC 6.10.7 message thread.

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BOINC blog