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MAINTAINING BOINC

Updates and extended information about BOINC development by Vitalii Koshura.

BOINC DEVELOPMENT STATUS REPORT: OCTOBER 2024

This month was relatively calm, with fewer events.

David and I are working on adding Docker support. Most of the core work is done,
but now we’re refining several parts of the existing functionality within the
BOINC client to ensure compatibility with the new type of applications. A major
advantage of Docker support, combined with WSL, is that it simplifies the
infrastructure significantly. This makes things easier for project developers,
as they no longer need to create separate applications for different operating
systems. Although Android will still require a dedicated application, having a
unified solution for desktop OSs is a significant step forward for BOINC. This
also means projects can potentially drop VirtualBox support in favor of Docker,
which is simpler and more flexible.

For more details about Docker and WSL, please refer to the following resources:

* https://github.com/BOINC/boinc/wiki/Docker
* https://github.com/BOINC/boinc/wiki/WSL-wrapper
* https://github.com/BOINC/boinc/wiki/Docker-app-implementation
* https://github.com/BOINC/boinc/wiki/Docker-apps
* https://github.com/BOINC/boinc/wiki/Docker-design-alternatives

With Docker support, we can also run applications that were previously
unsupported, which is very important for expanding BOINC’s functionality.

This year, I attended the GCB conference in Bielefeld, Germany, where I spoke
with several scientists. While they were generally interested in BOINC, their
first question was whether it could run Docker containers—a crucial capability
for them. Most of their applications are written in Python and require
additional packages to be installed on the system. Given BOINC's current
architecture, distributing workloads across hosts is challenging. Additionally,
many potential users interested in BOINC lack the time and expertise to set up
their own project servers or configure applications correctly.

Our responsibility as BOINC maintainers is to simplify this process as much as
possible and remove as many barriers as we can. Docker can be a significant help
here, as it allows users to configure their environment once, which BOINC can
then replicate automatically. While a project server is still required, we aim
to use BOINC Central for smaller research projects, providing access for
scientists who may not have the resources or skills to create their own server.

on November 02, 2024
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Labels: BOINC

BOINC WORKSHOP 2024: WHAT'S NEXT?

This year, the BOINC Workshop was hosted by CERN in Geneva. I was very excited
to go there and finally meet the people I had been working with virtually for
more than five years. I had planned to write a blog post about this at the
beginning of June, right after the Workshop. But after spending three days
there, I decided to take some time to reflect on the experience. Over the last
four months (and even longer by now), I’ve tried to write this post, but each
time I wasn’t ready. However, there’s no reason to hold back any longer, and I
feel it's time to share my thoughts.

I don’t want to repeat what David Anderson has already written, so I’ll just
link to his post here: https://continuum-hypothesis.com/trips/geneva_24.php.
It’s a very detailed and good report about the BOINC Workshop, the WSIS prize
(and the cake!), and Geneva in general. My thoughts about those three days are
pretty much in line with David’s.

The people were great, and the location was nice, but I left with a slightly
bitter taste. Mostly because I was expecting to see more new faces - people who
are new to BOINC - but instead, I only saw familiar ones.

I fully understand that the world has changed, and people are excited about
entirely different things now.

I remember myself about 15 years ago, staring at the graphics of the SETI@Home
application. It was completely incomprehensible to me, but still mesmerizing. My
PC back then had a single-core 1.8 GHz CPU, and I saw that finishing just one
SETI@Home work unit would take several hours, yet I had the feeling that my
computer was doing something great and important.

Today’s youth get bored if something takes longer than 10 seconds (is that
TikTok’s fault?). I’m not that old (almost 35), but I see that things that used
to excite me and the people I knew just don’t capture interest anymore. And I
don’t like that.

I don’t think I can change this on a global scale, but I still believe in BOINC
and its mission. I still believe BOINC is important. I know there are a lot of
smart people with great ideas, but they often lack the means to implement them.
Our mission is to help them.

During the Workshop, we discussed the need to implement Docker support in BOINC
since it could significantly accelerate research. Scientists today no longer
create applications in C/C++ or similar languages — they prefer using Python
(which is slower to run but faster to develop). Having the ability to run
complex Python scripts on BOINC without having to worry about the different
platforms those scripts might run on is incredibly important. David Anderson is
working on the first draft of a Docker wrapper for BOINC, and when it’s
released, I’m sure it will open a new chapter in BOINC’s story of success.

on October 13, 2024
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Labels: BOINC

BOINC RELEASE 8.0.0 AND LIBLZMA VULNERABILITY

Recently it was discovered that liblzma - the popular library for data
compression/decompression - contains a severe
vulnerability: https://tukaani.org/xz-backdoor/
Unfortunately, BOINC 8.0.0, that is available for alpha testing, was built with
the malicious 5.6.0 version of this library.
This is because liblzma is the dependency of libtiff that is a dependency of
wxWidgets, that is used to build the GUI of BOINC Manager.
As far as we can see, this issue doesn't affect our users, since the target of
this 'backdoor' is an sshd process, and BOINC doesn't work with it in any way.
Just to highlight one more time: only BOINC Manager was built with this library,
and BOINC client doesn't use this dependency at all. So we strongly believe that
our users are completely safe while using BOINC version 8.0.0
But since the analysis of this backdoor is not finished yet, we have decided to
build another release 8.0.1 that downgrade the liblzma version to 5.4.4 that is
completely safe. According to the available data, this backdoor works on Linux
only, that is why BOINC 8.0.1 will be released for alpha testing for Linux only.
We will continue monitoring the situation, and if needed, will release 8.0.1 for
other platforms as well.
Please use this page to find the instructions about using the BOINC Linux
packages: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/linux_install.php
Thank you for understanding.
Stay safe!

on April 01, 2024
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Labels: BOINC, Linux

MAJOR BOINC VERSION CHANGE

One may wonder, looking a the list below, why to change the major release
version if there are not so much changes made after the last release.

The main reason for that is the support of the new type of application that
allows running AI/ML applications on BOINC infrastructure, that have different
requirements. It's explained in more details
here: https://github.com/BOINC/boinc/wiki/Sporadic-Applications

Also, starting from the upcoming release, we will provide our own BOINC vanilla
packages for the major Linux
distributions: https://aenbleidd.blogspot.com/2024/02/vanilla-boinc-packages-reason-and.html

Although the current list of supported Linux distributions is quite short and
contains only 4 of them, more will be added later. We tried to concentrate on
the most popular distributions, and will add others step-by-step.

In this release the detection of Android GPUs was finally
fixed: https://aenbleidd.blogspot.com/2023/08/android-boinc-where-are-my-gpus.html

This Release Candidate should be available for a public alpha testing before the
end of March 2024.

The list of the most important changes, introduced in the next release you can
find below.

BOINC 8.0.0 RELEASE CANDIDATE

NEW FEATURES

ALL (ANDROID, LINUX, MACOS, WINDOWS)

* Add support of Sporadic Applications

ANDROID

* Add protection to Password field to confirm 'Show' and 'Edit' action with
default device protection mechanism: password or Fingerprint/FaceID if
available)
* Show users battery-optimization page on request if applicable

LINUX

* Building DEB (Debian 10/11/12, Ubuntu 20.04/22.04) and RPM (Fedora 37/38/39,
openSUSE 15.4/15.5) packages

MACOS

* Add 'Apple GPU' as an official GPU type

BUG FIXES

BOINC DESKTOP (LINUX, MACOS, WINDOWS)

* Disk tab displays bad data when connecting to new host
* Ryzen 7950x lacks feature sse2
* When another instance of the BOINC Manager is already running - show the
corresponding message to the user
* Make sure sleep completes before killing descendants

ANDROID

* Android BOINC 7.16.16 stays in memory all the time
* Android BOINC 7.16.16 will give notification of suspending and resuming
* Android BOINC 7.16.16 will give notification that BOINC is suspended and
waiting for a charger each time the phone is unlocked
* Mali GPU not detected on android boinc 7.16.16
* Detect Adreno GPU
* BOINC doesn't stop on android 13

LINUX

* Exiting boinc-manager stops boinc-client service
* Linux Manager (systemd service): lockfile not deleted
* On Linux, the manager cannot start the core client as a service
* Subsidiary windows blank from skinned Simple View
* Correctly detect CPU cores when cpuset cgroup is used

MACOS

* macOS menu bar item needs updating
* Fix Automatic language detection

WINDOWS

* Add AVX-512 detection
* Add missing Windows SKUs (IoT Enterprise, Azure, etc)

on March 18, 2024
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Labels: BOINC

ANDROID BOINC: WHERE ARE MY GPUS?

Once we made a new release of Android BOINC several years ago, and immediately
after received several similar bug reports of the missing GPU detection. That
was a very interesting case, because between the releases we made no changes to
the GPU detection, and still on the same Android OS, old version was working
fine, and the new one not.

Since there was no any Project that has an application for any Android GPU, this
issue was classified as non-blocker, and we didn't rollback that release.

Still this case was very interesting, and I have started the investigation of
it. And at that moment I started to realize, that every new Android release
breaks something that was working for years. Of course, main explanation of such
an actions was a security issues.

From the very beginning, Android was a very open platform (in comparison to the
iOS for example), and it allowed you to do almost anything you want. But, of
course, this leads to security issues, including the major ones.

Android BOINC application is very different from the Desktop implementation.
First of all, BOINC Manager is written on Java and Kotlin (originally it was
written on Java, but we have started to migrate it to Kotlin as it is more
modern, safer and easier to maintain). But BOINC client is still written on C++,
because reimplement all the functionality of it on Java/Kotlin would be too much
work, and not everything required by the BOINC client was yet available (and
some stuff still not) in the Android API.

But Android API from version to version started to deprecate and even remove the
functionality that is crucial for running BOINC on Android. For example, we are
not able to upgrade to the latest version of the Android API because then we
will not be able neither to run the client natively, nor to run the downloaded
Projects' applications. We spent quite a lot of time trying to understand how to
proceed with this, and at that moment decided that we will stick to the current
version of Android API as long as possible. But as a drawback, we are not able
to publish Android BOINC on the Play Store, because Play Store policies demand
to use the newer version of the Android API that doesn't work for us. That is
why currently Android BOINC is published on the official BOINC website and on
F-Droid (3rd party service not supported by us) only.

Another issue was with the GPUs. In this case there was a change in the API that
prevented BOINC from listing available GPUs on the device. Luckily, there still
was a way to implement this GPU discovery in a little bit weird way, but at
least it works.

However, there is still no any Project that has the application for Android GPU,
but we really hope that with the fix we provided, once we will see such a
Project that will allow BOINC to utilize Android device more effectively than
now.

on March 16, 2024
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Labels: Android, BOINC

VANILLA BOINC PACKAGES: THE REASON AND THE PURPOSE

I have very controversial feelings about open-source software and Linux OS. From
one hand, I like the idea of the transparency, when you can always check what is
really doing every application you run. From the other hand, as a maintainer of
the application, you lose some part of control on it, because it is possible to
modify some application's behavior (e.g. via distro patches), that contradicts
the original idea of it or break some functionality. And because there are so
many different OSs, you can't keep an eye on all of them. That is why sometimes
you receive a bug report that looks completely weird, and when you start doing
the investigation, you realize, that this happened because of the distro patch,
that was intended to fix another issue, but as a result introduced a new one.
And, as a maintainer of the application, there are not so much options for you
here. But in any case, you have unsatisfied user, that is always bad.

We, at BOINC, faced several times the situation when the package that is
distributed with the distro is completely broken, and users have no idea how to
fix that. You can post instructions, blog posts, answer questions of forums, but
still the same question about the same bug will be asked. Sometimes the
communication with the distro maintainers becomes hot, and every party is
completely sure that only their opinion is correct.

To get rid of this situation, we decided to create our own BOINC vanilla builds
for Linux. We have started with the most popular distributions: Debian, Ubuntu,
Fedora and openSUSE. Currently we target only the LTS releases that are
officially supported, so that is why for now we provide packages for Ubuntu
20.04 and 22.04 only.

More details (including the list of supported OSs) are
here: https://github.com/BOINC/boinc/wiki/Linux-DEB-and-RPM-support

Since building all these packages (20 in total for every version) is quite a
task, I had to try to automate this as much as possible, including adding some
integration tests to avoid very dumb bugs. I can't say that the current CI is
finished, but it does its work already: every night we have a new build that is
automatically published to the 'nightly' channel on the BOINC official website.
This gives our users the opportunity to test new features as soon as they added
to the codebase even before the alpha testing phase begins. I can't say this is
a recommended way of installing BOINC, but since we have now 2-3 releases every
year, it might be helpful for those who have problems with the issues that are
blockers for them only.

These packages are not yet recommended to use, but the first result is already
very promising. On the video below the process of installation of both BOINC
client and Manager on Ubuntu 22.04 is shown:

Of course, there are still some issues, but now it will be much easier to fix
them and deliver to our users faster.

Stay tuned for further updates.

on February 28, 2024
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Labels: BOINC, Linux

INTRODUCTION

Several weeks ago I was working on a solution for a bug that was in Android
BOINC for at least 4 years. This bug was very minor, that is why it was not
fixed during all this time.

This was not the easiest bug to fix, and it required quite a deep research into
Android internals, so I decided that it would be nice to share my findings
(there will be a post about it later).

Usually I don't like writing long posts, but sometimes it's very important to
share some information, including the technical one, with the people who might
be interested in it. Also, such a posts might bring some light to the technical
and design solutions in BOINC.

So, if any of you ever asked a question like "Why this was done in BOINC in this
way?", you could probably find some answers in this blog.

I'm not a blogger, but I'll try to share more information about BOINC and what
happens around it. This blog will not contain any personal and/or any other
information that is not related to BOINC in one or another way. Also, the posts
will be more or less big. That is why it will be updated very rare. Shorter but
more frequent news and updates I usually post on my X/Twitter and/or Mastodon
pages.

on October 14, 2023
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Labels: BOINC

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