GPU Bitcoin Mining on old-ish hardware

[Christopher Browne]

I noticed that Debian had added a "specialized CPU" package for
bitcoin mining (http://packages.debian.org/sid/main/bfgminer) and
thought I might try exercising that on the IBM Xeon server I picked up
last year.  (Purty old, but it runs...)

The server has an ATI Radeon 7000 series graphics card built in...
root at tucker:~# lspci  | grep -i radeon
01:06.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
[AMD/ATI] RV100 [Radeon 7000 / Radeon VE]

I inferred from that that I should be installing an ATI OpenCL package
in order to be able to exercise it.  I pulled a ~150MB download from
ATI, and started up an X server.

Alas, bfgminer doesn't recognize this as a GPU that it can use:

root at tucker:~# bfgminer -n
 [2013-12-15 21:52:21] 0 GPU devices max detected

It's quite possible that the RV100 is too ancient to be supportable by OpenCL.

It's also possible (poking at this) that I need to install ATI
proprietary-ish binaries to get X to recognize more about the RV100.
(ergo, another 150MB of downloads :-( ).

Is it possible I'm one little step (ATI bins) away from this being
workable?  Or is this just Too Ancient and/or Too Fiddly to be worth
bothering with?

-- 
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question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"
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