How to debug BOINC No usable GPUs found

If you’re running BOINC on a system with a GPU, you might encounter the error message No usable GPUs found. This can happen even if you have a GPU installed and working correctly. Here’s how to fix it.

GPU detection failed: process was terminated by signal 48
read_coproc_info_file() returned error -108
No usable GPUs found

First, check /var/lib/boinc/coproc_info.xml. It typically contains the error message such as

    <coprocs>
<warning>NVIDIA drivers present but no GPUs found</warning>
<warning>ATI: libaticalrt.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory</warning>
<warning>No OpenCL GPUs or Accelerators found</warning>
<warning>OpenCL library present but no OpenCL-capable devices found</warning>
    </coprocs>

In this case, the error message is ATI: libaticalrt.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory. This means that the libaticalrt.so file is missing.

We now need to find the package which contains libaticalrt.so. On Ubuntu, you can use the apt-file package to search for the package containing the file:

sudo apt install apt-file
sudo apt-file update
apt-file search libaticalrt.so

In this specific case, this package is from the fglrx driver which is not available for more recent Ubuntu versions.