Just curious as to why..............

When new features, fixes and so forth are added to Boinc do old features that were previously working become broken?

Seems to me that once a feature is coded and working it should stay working even as the program progresses through development.

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Boinc....Boinc....Boinc....Boinc

Examples?

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There was one version that suddenly failed to recognize CUDA cards and so all the work units labled for CUDA were suddenly dumped.

I see comments all the time on the email lists that mention something that is not working but was previously.

I just don't understand why something that was working fine suddenly stops working with a software update.

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Boinc....Boinc....Boinc....Boinc

Later Boinc 6.10.x versions don't dump Wu's when GPU's removed, their status messages just say GPU missing,
what version was it that suddenly failed to recognize CUDA cards?

On what lists do you see these reports?

Claggy

How about an actual project programer respond to my question since the responses so far do not address the question.

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Boinc....Boinc....Boinc....Boinc

How about an actual project programer respond to my question since the responses so far do not address the question.

I'm not a project programmer but have done programming in the past. Despite using a modular approach to the code, most programs do have interdependencies. Make a change or addition in one part of the code and other sections can be adversely effected. This is why a complete set of test needs to be done before each public releases. Even so it isn't possible to test for every combinations and configurations so undetected bugs can slip into the wild.

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Boinc V 7.4.36
Win7 i5 3.33G 4GB NVidia 470

If you want to ask the developers, you'll have to ask at those email lists you look at.

Alpha versions of BOINC (recognizable by the warning that they are Development Versions on the download all page) have new things in them that need to be tested on as many hardware/OS combinations as possible. It's quite normal for things not to work in them, which is why we report these things on the alpha email list. That's probably where you see the reports of things not working. It's normal to see comments there that things aren't working.

And even then, it depends on people's systems as well. What may work fine on one of your machines, may not work on one of mine. Not only do (minute) variations in hardware give different outcomes, but also the status of how your OS is updated, what you do with the system, how dusty it's on the inside, in what environment it sits... You get the picture.

Even when it's all been tested and given a clean slate by the alpha testers, there are hardware combinations out there in the world that will react different to changes in BOINC. The last retrieval of the client was one of those, it didn't come up during the two weeks of final testing. Everyone wants a new version to be as bug free as possible. If code - that checks for the GPU to have enough memory, else BOINC will stop downloading work to that GPU - is broken and computers out there in the wild download massive amounts of work for the GPU that's never done, then that client cannot be recommended and has to be retrieved.

BOINC 6.6 saw the integration of CUDA. We ran a long range of 6.5's before that, as normally versions with the middle number being an even number are recommended release versions. Or close to recommended, when we're finally going out of alpha. For BOINC 6.10 the developers thought they could skip the 6.9 range, as all it needed was to add ATI code. Easily enough... too bad we're now at 6.10.56 and the code is finally stable enough to think about releasing this one to the public. A good 40+ releases and 6 months late.

But then the code in this version has now been tested thoroughly. The devs know what's still broken and what needs attention, their TODO lists are bulging. Nothing in the present code is worthy of being a show-stopper though.

And by now we're all itching to go to 6.11, to see what the next generation BOINC is going to do. If you go run 6.11s, then do know that they will break options, preferences, things you take for granted. They're alpha versions.

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Thanks Aurora and Ageless.........

Good responses with good info.

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Boinc....Boinc....Boinc....Boinc

There was one version that suddenly failed to recognize CUDA cards and so all the work units labled for CUDA were suddenly dumped.

You may be thinking of people trying to optimize with Lunatic's package. When SETI started sending out 6.09 WUs to take advantage of the new 2.3 DLLs. The Lunatic's opts were still set for 6.08s. As soon as you turned it on it would dump all the 6.09s and ask for 6.08s.

There was also a problem where, I think, a combination of a newer BOINC and new DLLs were showing less memory. This caused some GPUs on the borderline memorywise that were working before to continue to ask for GPU work then not run it due to not enough memory.