In a situation with folding under Linux, I would always recommend to have 2 setups.
A main setup, running FAH, and a cheaper alternative for experimenting.
For instance, buy a cheap second hand PC on eBay. A Dell, an old core 2 duo or whatever is in the $50 range; with GPU slot, and get a cheap, $25-35 NVidia GT 1030 from eBay.
Buy additionally a Linux compatible wifi dongle if you need it, a $15-20 (32-64GB) SSD, and experiment with it.
Overall, it's a sub $100 investment.
You learn how to use Linux, while your main rig (windows or Linux) is folding.
Whatever procedure works for a GT 1030, will work for all NVidia cards up to the RTX 2080.
For RTX 2080Ti, NVidia drivers call on another bit, so the 2080ti is not hotswappable with other cards, but basically, if your system is set up for a GT 1030, GTX or RTX card, you can turn off the PC, up or downgrade the card to a faster or slower one, by just physically swapping the card out, and boot the PC without any problems.
If you're running NVidia cards and Linux (I recommend Lubuntu 18.10 over mint even) on one PC, you can experiment different flavors of Linux on the other.
Once you've worked out a solution (eg: what flavor of Linux, how to install everything and make it work) on your cheap PC, repeat the procedure on your main rig.
The procedure will be 90-99% identical.
Keep logs!
Logs on PPD, temperature, GPU overclocking and power settings, Linux OS, driver versions,...
This so you more hard evidence of certain changes benefit the folding or not.
Believe me, after trying out a variety of settings and operating systems, numbers will blur, and a small sticky tag note with some main parameters can be a welcome reference point.
Not only learning how to use Linux, or experimenting with different flavors of Linux, but regularly NVidia will come out with new drivers.
Not all newer drivers will work better.
Current latest 430.26 drivers work slower than 418 drivers for folding.
All this can be tested before implementation on your main rig.
Another, Linux's new kernel updates, security patches, or is upgrades.
Occasionally vulnerabilities are exposed.
In my case, my main server was attacked a few days ago, since it hadn't received a kernel patch update, while my smaller unit did have a patched kernel, and on the same network, was unaffected.
Lastly, in case of hardware failure, and waiting for parts.
If your main server went out due to hardware failure, and you're waiting for parts, or trying to identify the problem, it's easy to just swap out your best graphics cards to the cheap alternative. While it won't give best PPD, it'll at least keep you folding in the meantime.
If you aren't too fond of Lubuntu with more of a windows 7 desktop layout, you can try Mint, which is popular and similar but less stable and a bit more bloated.
Kubuntu, which is based on the KDE interface, also a windows 7 desktop variant, is stable, but many find it looking less appealing, and is using slightly more resources.
Ubuntu or Xubuntu, which have more of a Mac Os looks,
Debian, which you will get for stability, server hardware, and performance.
Debian is a popular is amongst IT staff, but it's not as pleasing to work with, and commands vary slightly from Ubuntu variants.
Debian is the grandfather, Ubuntu and it's variants are the father, and mint is the child.
Redhat/centos is also supported. It's a lot different from Ubuntu/Debian.
Redhat would be the great uncle, centos the uncle, and Fedora the nephew.
Same extended family, but not quite the same family.
Fedora is most unstable. Since fah control needs python 2, you'll have to run fahclient headless on Fedora, which is quite a pain.
MacOs only supports CPU folding, not GPU.
Aside from that, FreeBSD and Intel's clear Linux aren't supported at this time.
Nevertheless, FreeBSD is based on Unix, which MacOs is too.
If fah CPU folding works on MacOs, it should work on Unix, and should be able to be ported over to FreeBSD .
But no GPU folding there.
Considering the fact that FreeBSD is an OS made for security, and known to lack in a lot of day to day performance tasks, and more progress and optimizations habe been done on Linux than Unix, I would stick with a Linux based, preferably Ubuntu derived variant for folding.
post edited by ProDigit - 2019/06/24 04:33:58