How to make fah client less fussy about what host OS or kernel is running

[liminal]

It appears that every time I reboot my debian 12.9 bookworm rig with a new kernel, "Machine ID" changes, which invalidates or suspends any WU in progress. Probably they get mothballed indefinitely. Log shows errors for a WU in progress, how it "does not belong" to a certain Client ID hash. Several of these orphans are accumulating, 100% finished but blocked from uploading results. On top of that, other distros running on the same rig have distinct Machine IDs and so are unable to share WUs. This quickly gets even more unmanageable.

In a previous cut of the fah client which had fewer features, it was also much less picky about such like. Using a file system mount shared among different linux distros, all debian-related, all running on the same host, often with near identical kernels, it was able to load up & make progress on the same WU regardless of which distro or kernel variant was running at the time. That I considered a feature, which missing was hardly to be endured!

MySQL database files appear to track the minutiae of keeping these orphans unavailable for upload. Is it really worth it to FAH science integrity, tossing out so much folding computation so? I'd say older editions weren't broken in those terms, what rationale to fix it makes sense?

Thanks for any insights and advice.

[calxalot]

This may be an interesting read for you

https://github.com/FoldingAtHome/fah-cl ... issues/216

If you want to use v8 and want to multi boot with a shared fah data directory, you might need to delete machine-id from client.db before the client launches.

Or you might need to put the correct machine-id in for the new machine.

[calxalot]

Easiest solution is to use v7 or always Finish and Pause before rebooting.

[muziqaz]

How often does Debian change kernels? Every 10 years?
I'll need to test it on my own Debian system to see if that is the case, but then again, encountering kernel update on Debian is once in a blue moon opportunity, my testing might take decades.
Also, I have not encountered any such problems with other distros, which are actually changing their kernels like I do with my socks.

[muziqaz]

I tested this on Mint Linux, installed kernel 6.13.2 and rebooted while my CPU was still folding a WU. No issues whatsoever