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)

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.