GPU on Linux

I've got a really nice GPU that I am not using at all on my Linux (Debian Etch) box. Its a ATI Radeon HD 2400XT, and I'm using it as a server, through a KVM to a VGA-only LCD monitor. The graphics card has two DVI jacks, its got to have enough GPU power to do some folding.

I know that GPUs are not "supported" under Linux. But how do we hack it to work?

I've seen vague references to using Wine and the Windows GPU code, but nothing explicit enough to follow.

Can't see letting cycles go to waste.

wine or cedega will likely be your only option as VMWare Server uses more memoru so would slow it down quite a bit more than just wine/cedega but you will see around 20-40% performance decrease with wine and over 50% using VMware. Since it is just a server this may or may not be a problem because it should at least give you 1000-1500 ppd or more.

I can't see cedega as bringing much to the table, and WMware is over kill.

Got any links to using wine for this?

The GPU client will not run under Wine. Simple reason, it uses the Windows ATi Driver to direct calculations through the GPU. This kind of thing can't really be done through wine which just translates API calls from Windows-land into the Unix equivalent (for graphics this would be translating DirectX calls to OpenGL ones).

Not gonna happen. But a Linux GPU core has been a long-term goal of the team for a while, but it'll likely need the proprietary driver (scratch that, it WILL).

Not even with the ATI "propriatary" linux drivers?

Long term goals are nice, better is to have someone actually working on it. Sounds like the latter is not happening.

Yeh but its sacrilege to use proprietary software...

And anyway the Windowz drivers were specifically adapted to allow folding instructions to run, so it would take work from ATi to adapt their Linux drivers, as well as F@H to port the code.

I know that is a common theology, but Windows is proprietary, and the GPU stuff *only* works on it.

Its a bit of a quibble to worry about proprietary software on specialized hardware, its not ever going to be likely that you can get effective use of the MIMD processing on ATI or nVidia boards without doing it their way.

it is a common theology, but more common is the misconception that Windows works for technical reasons...

I'm not going to get into this as its an ideological issue more than anything and my views on it are rather... extreme.

Anywho, sufficed to say its not technically feasible for US to make the GPU core work under wine. It would take collaboration on ATI's part with the F@H crew. Or we could just overthrow capitalism, free society from its oppressors and open the source to all available software and allow the folding community itself to run the clients on whatever they can.

Or nVidia....

Is there any actual work going on in this? I keep reading about new video cards announced what sounds like weekly, each faster and cheaper than the last.