GPU Bitcoin Mining on old-ish hardware

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sun, Dec 15, 2013 at 09:57:12PM -0500, Christopher Browne wrote:
> 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?

Well you almost certainly would need the binary drivers.  Those tend
to not support cards that aren't fairly recent, although I have no idea
how old a Radeon 7000 is.  Seems to be a 2001 era card.  There is NO way
there is driver support for that, and almost certainly no way it could
run openCL stuff.  It is completely obsolete.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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