LHC@home

LHC@Home is not a plug and play project like other BOINC-Projects are.

You can easily run LHC@Home like a plug and play project: if you run Sixtrack only
You can easily run LHC@Home like a plug and play project: if you run one of Atlas / Theory / CMS exclusively and if you keep this setting: "Use at most 100 % of CPU time" (VMs don't like this kind of throttling)

If you want to run all kind of applications LHC@Home offers, you will have to make micro-managing with your client; BOINC will not be able to always give you what you want for your client.

After forgetting why I stopped running LHC last year, I ran it again and quickly ran into problems, not wanting to go through that mammoth post (and spend hours following the dozens of steps!) about how to get VM working properly I tried the 2nd option as above, choosing Theory sim (as it seems to have the most WUs).
But even sticking with that, and when I had 100% cpu time set, I still ran into problems :(, about a dozen WUs are showing "Postponed: VM Environment needed to be cleaned up", now firstly that message is talking past tense, so is it sorted now or is that just bad English and it should say ..."needs to be cleaned up". I thinking perhaps the later because multiple WUs are showing that message, also another 6 WUs are showing the message "Postponed: b" ,and no I haven't typo'd that's all they say :p.
So why am I getting those messages even though I'm only running Theory sim exclusively?
Also, LHC is causing bad system lag, even though I have loads of spare RAM available. What's that about?
Additionally, some WUs are showing ETAs of 10 days! What's that about? (although I don't think any are actually taking that long).
Main rig specs in sig.

I really like the LHC@home projects ideas and the research it's doing for LHC, one of the projects I'm most interested in, but this rubbish VM app is just making it a nightmare and I'm not going to bother if it's going to take hours to fix. I thought I could just run Sixtrack again, but that project seems to often run out of WUs.

PS, Yeti, your user of the day :)

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Team AnandTech - WCG, Uni@H, F@H, MW@H, Ast@H, LHC@H, R@H, CPDN, E@H.
Main rig - Ryzen 3600, MSI B450 Gm Pro C AC, 32GB DDR4 3200, RTX 3060 Ti 8GB, Win10 64bit
2nd rig - i7 4930k @4.1 GHz, 16 GB DDR3 1866, HD 7870XT 3GB(DS), Win7 64

You have successful running Theory-Tasks from today.
So, the project works for you.
Maybe overloading..., network..., no more good ideas from my side.

about a dozen WUs are showing "Postponed: VM Environment needed to be cleaned up", now firstly that message is talking past tense, so is it sorted now or is that just bad English and it should say ..."needs to be cleaned up".

Indeed, this appears to be a major BOINC error being there for nearly 5 years now.
You may quickly prepare a PR here, otherwise I will do and get the fame.

another 6 WUs are showing the message "Postponed: b" ,and no I haven't typo'd that's all they say ...

They simply crashed and didn't have enough time to correctly print an error message.
Just to mention it since you insist on correct language: it should be ", and" instead of " ,and".

So why am I getting those messages even though I'm only running Theory sim exclusively?
Also, LHC is causing bad system lag ...

You run (or just start) too many of them concurrently.


Even if the advice is written in past tense you should follow it's core message:
- Stop BOINC
- Use VirtualBox Manager and VirtualBox Medium Manager to remove orphaned "disks" and VM definitions.
- Restart BOINC

Additionally, some WUs are showing ETAs of 10 days! What's that about?

Can be ignored.
BOINC just shows "something" instead of "nothing" since it can't see what's going on in a VM.

this r...... VM app

You may read this and follow the rules given there - especially the 1st part of the 1st rule.

What version of VirtualBox should be run with LHC@Home? The BOINC kit indicates 6.1.12, but when you install the software, 6.0.14 is actually installed. It doesn't work, I manually upgraded to 6.1.12 and it doesn't work, I've tried 6.1.22, which I think has worked in the distant past and it doesn't work, and I've tried 6.1.32 and it doesn't work either. Extension packs installed for each.

I've gone through the Yeti Check List multiple times and cannot find any obvious configuration mistakes that would prevent CMS, ATLAS and Theory Simulation tasks from downloading. Are these now GPU only tasks? I just keep getting message that no tasks are available. Yet, a week ago I downloaded 40 CMS tasks that all failed because my AMD based virtualization setting in BIOS was not enabled. This was corrected but can't get CMS to download since.

Is there a trick to get LHC and BOINC to recognize VirtualBox or vise-versa? I'm showing no evidence that any tasks have arrived or run in VB.

(BOINC 7.16.20(x64), 6.1.12 r139181(Qt5.6.2),Win10, AMD processor 32 threads, 64Gb Ram, plenty of disk space)

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Visit your prefs page:
https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/prefs.php?subset=project
and ensure "Run native if available?" is unchecked.
Then request fresh work.

Server's refusal to send new work is a problem that has been around quite a long time. No reason or a definite solution for this has been identified. It just seems to torment some computers every now and then. Some times I have been successful to restart flow of tasks was to change the cache size or number of tasks setting on project preferences. Maybe it was just pure luck that server started to send new work after that.

The version of VBox has nothing to do with what you are seeing. I am using still 5.1.22 and 5.2.44 without issues.

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As of now the computer details report this:
https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/show_host_detail.php?hostid=9943678
"Virtualbox (6.1.12) installed, CPU does not have hardware virtualization support"
To run vbox apps from LHC@home this must be enabled and controlled by VirtualBox.

This means virtualization
- is either disabled in the BIOS or by Windows
- has been disabled in the past and BOINC remembers that: see <p_vm_extensions_disabled> in Yeti's cecklist
- Windows forces Hyper-V; this must completely be disabled: see
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-client/application-management/virtualization-apps-not-work-with-hyper-v

In addition run "bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off", then reboot.

I was having similar problem a few weeks ago where Boinc was reporting that Virtualization was either not supported or switched off, when I knew that it was supported and I had definitely turned it on in Bios.
An overprotective Avast Antivirus feature (apparently AVG is the same base) was what was stopping that contact, perhaps the two virtualisation instances not playing well together, much as Hyper-V causes problems.
Turning that feature off and rebooting to get it to stick, got me going again.
Hope that helps you, or other that might be encountering this problem.

I'm running into an odd one, as all was working on an old version of BOINC. However I ran into a handful of tasks that ran on 2+ days and stuck at 99.95% progress, but in reality probably not even 5%. Anyhow to try to help remedy, I upgraded to the latest version of BOINC as well as the virtual box that came with the latest release. Rather then remedying, now ALL LHC tasks fail, and almost straight away. I haven't had time to try to track this one down; but it seems to not like the newest release of BOINC from Berkely....

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Exclusive HW virtualization use: off
Is Hyper-V enabled?
This must be disabled.

about a dozen WUs are showing "Postponed: VM Environment needed to be cleaned up", now firstly that message is talking past tense, so is it sorted now or is that just bad English and it should say ..."needs to be cleaned up".

Indeed, this appears to be a major BOINC error being there for nearly 5 years now.
You may quickly prepare a PR here, otherwise I will do and get the fame.

another 6 WUs are showing the message "Postponed: b" ,and no I haven't typo'd that's all they say ...

They simply crashed and didn't have enough time to correctly print an error message.
Just to mention it since you insist on correct language: it should be ", and" instead of " ,and".

So why am I getting those messages even though I'm only running Theory sim exclusively?
Also, LHC is causing bad system lag ...

You run (or just start) too many of them concurrently.


Even if the advice is written in past tense you should follow it's core message:
- Stop BOINC
- Use VirtualBox Manager and VirtualBox Medium Manager to remove orphaned "disks" and VM definitions.
- Restart BOINC

Additionally, some WUs are showing ETAs of 10 days! What's that about?

Can be ignored.
BOINC just shows "something" instead of "nothing" since it can't see what's going on in a VM.

this r...... VM app

You may read this and follow the rules given there - especially the 1st part of the 1st rule.

Apologies for a very late reply (I forgot about this and gave up on LHC VM apps) & and thank you for your reply.
I've no idea what a PR is, but I take it you've long since taken the fame! :D
Well spotted on my typo, I make many, but usually spot them just after I've posted, so BOINC forums extremely limited edit time occasionally thwarts that ;)

Re concurrent tasks, I would've just let BOINC do it's thing, if only 1 task could (can?) be run at a time, I wouldn't know how to limit BOINC like that.
Nor would I have known (or know) how to do this "- Use VirtualBox Manager and VirtualBox Medium Manager to remove orphaned "disks" and VM definitions."

I don't recall BOINC giving me those 3 instructions from a core message, beyond its "Postponed: VM Environment needed to be cleaned up"

Re the forum's 1st rule :-
Our message boards are moderated. Posts are subject to the following rules:

Posts must be 'kid friendly': they may not contain content that is obscene, hate-related, sexually explicit or suggestive.

I've no idea what you are talking about here, my post was kid friendly, not in the slightest obscene nor did it have any of the last 3 misdemeanours.
The most you can say is that I was slightly rude by calling the app 'rubbish', perhaps you could say I breached the last point in rule 5, but that was my opinion and I said it in a very mild way.

Anyway, it's been ~2.5 yrs since these posts, Have these issues been resolved now? Or does VM LHC still require micro-managing/setting up?

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Team AnandTech - WCG, Uni@H, F@H, MW@H, Ast@H, LHC@H, R@H, CPDN, E@H.
Main rig - Ryzen 3600, MSI B450 Gm Pro C AC, 32GB DDR4 3200, RTX 3060 Ti 8GB, Win10 64bit
2nd rig - i7 4930k @4.1 GHz, 16 GB DDR3 1866, HD 7870XT 3GB(DS), Win7 64

Just had a bunch of tasks fall over. Computer had rebooted during the night so my up to date kernel made VB fall over.

VBoxManage: error: VirtualBox can't enable the AMD-V extension. Please disable the KVM kernel extension, recompile your kernel and reboot (VERR_SVM_IN_USE)
VBoxManage

To get VB tasks to run I have to run

sudo rmmod kvm_amd kvm

in a terminal. The instructions for making the change permanent on the page I found the answer didn't work.

I would be surprised if there are not more than a few people suffering this problem. I would be grateful if anyone has a permafix for this that doesn't need to be applied on each reboot.
Linux Ubuntu
Ubuntu 25.04 [6.14.0-15- I understand problem is from 6.12 onwards.
AMD Ryzen 9 7950X
Virtual Box 7.0.20
BOINC 8.3.0 (Compiled from source.)