GPU Bitcoin Mining on old-ish hardware

[Christopher Browne]

On Tue, Dec 17, 2013 at 4:44 PM, Lennart Sorensen
<lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> 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.

That seems right.  I had no trouble installing OpenCL, but that's not the
interesting bit; it also required installing the closed source ATI Radeon
X driver, and when I pulled *that* (the second 150MB of downloads that
I alluded to), the installer poked at the graphics card and concluded it
was not supported.

Poof.

Agreed, it's essentially completely obsolete, at least for the
purpose of running OpenCL.  Perfectly sufficient for displaying a bit
of graphics, not that I particularly care, as the box is intended as a
server.

Thanks all for the comments; the "soft" answers to the effect that
bitcoin mining is a mostly futile exercise are probably of general
interest.
-- 
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question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"
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