Release Notes for BOINC 7.4

Version 7.4.42 of BOINC was released for general public use on 24 March 2015.

Previous version: release notes for version 7.2.

Changes in 7.4.42

• Update localizations
• Screensaver fix for when the client is suspended
• When using a proxy, fallback to HTTP 1.0 if the proxy returns a 417 status code.
• Fixed Windows 10 detection (kernel version change)
• Advanced Event Log Diagnostics window for easier setting of debug flags.

Changes in 7.4.36 (1 January 2015)

• Attaching to World Community Grid
• Back-up projects (0 Resource Share)
• Better detection of notice updates (reduces the number of system notifications)
• Suspending GPUs should not suspend Bitcoin Miners
• Increasing the maximum number of coprocessor devices to 64
• Updates to OpenSSL(1.0.1j) and LibCurl(7.39.0)

Changes in 7.4.26/7.4.27 (11 November 2014)

• Add support for notices that contain images and videos.
• Add support for generic OpenCL devices. (Parallella, etc.)
• Add support for ASIC Miners.
• Add new AMD GPU descriptions.
• Add new Windows version descriptions.
• Add support for Mac OS X 10.10 (Yosemite)
• Add support for Windows 10

ASIC Miners

BOINC now has support for ASIC Miners. An ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) is a device that is specialized to perform a single task very quickly, and a miner is a device that mines cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin in order to generate value.

To configure an ASIC Miner coprocessor type in BOINC, you will need to add a "coproc" XML element to your cc_config.xml configuration file, including child elements for type and count. Type should be miner_asic, and count should be the number of such devices that you plan on using in BOINC. Additionally, depending on the project and the application, you may need to specify certain application command line parameters in an app_config.xml file, in order to properly run multiple ASIC Miners or to overclock them. See BOINC Configuration for general information on configuring those files.

Bitcoin Utopia is a BOINC project that has developed applications designed to utilize this new resource type. Please see their website and forums, for details and support.

OpenCL support for CPU

BOINC 7.4 has OpenCL support for CPUs, but this does require that you install OpenCL drivers for your CPU.

Windows

AMD has an OpenCL 1.2 driver available for any AMD CPU with SSE2 and later.
Get it from their download page. For stability reasons, you may not want to install the sample applications. They may destabilize your system.

Intel has an OpenCL 1.2 driver available for 3rd and 4th Generation Intel Core.
Top right corner of this page has the download links. A separate driver is available for 1st and 2nd Generation Intel Core CPUs, 32bit version here, 64bit version here.

Note: When you have an AMD HD 5XXX or higher, or FirePro GPU installed, with up-to-date Catalyst drivers, your CPU may already have OpenCL support enabled.
To test OpenCL support being enabled, see Determine OpenCL capability of GPU and CPU in the BOINC FAQs Wiki.

Linux

For Linux support, AMD requires a minimum of openSUSE 11.x, Ubuntu 11.04, or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.x for AMD OpenCL support on the CPU.
Intel requires a minimum of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for Intel OpenCL support on the CPU.

Note: It's possible that installing either CPU SDK will work on the other CPU brand as well.

Known Issues

The following issues are already known to the developers:

Linux

BOINC 7.4 incompatible with Fedora: Due to a problem with incompatible wxWidget build options BOINC 7.0 will not work on Fedora 14 & 15.
This cannot be fixed, due to a difference in how wxWidgets is compiled between Fedora Core and Ubuntu. Ubuntu is the platform BOINC is built on.

Windows

Service Installation, GPU detection and Windows XP: Due to problems with up-to-date GPU drivers causing BOINC to crash or hang, it was decided that for all versions of Windows the GPU detection will no longer work when BOINC is installed as a service. This may change in a future version, but only after the GPU manufacturers have adjusted their driver code. So even in Windows 2000 and XP you can now no longer install BOINC as a service yet still have it detect your GPU(s) and run work on it. This change is present since 6.12.38

BOINC 7.4 incompatible with Domain Controllers: The present range of BOINC 7 is incompatible with Domain Controllers, meaning that you cannot install it on your system if it is a DC. This is because the developers used the Local Account API's instead of the Global Account API's.

Install BOINC 5.10.45 instead, even though this doesn't support GPUs or multi-threading applications.

BOINC 5.10.45 32bit version
BOINC 5.10.45 64bit version

Error 1069: Service cannot be started because of a faulty login:

This happens after something has removed the "Logon as a Service" from the "boinc_master" user account that was created during setup.

Known reasons for why this might happen:

• The administrator for your network has specified which accounts are allowed to "Logon as a Service" via Group Policy. Any account not on that list is stripped of that user right.

Macintosh OS X

BOINC ownership or properties are not set correctly: After you updated to Mavericks, you will need to reinstall BOINC to fix the permissions to groups and users. When you neglect to do so, you'll get the message BOINC ownership or permissions are not set properly; please reinstall BOINC. (Error Code - 1008), so just follow that advice and all will be well.