All my ATLAS tasks failed with error "206 (0x000000CE) EXIT_INIT_FAILURE", for example:
https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/result.php?resultid=432461662

Any ideas would be helpful. Thank you.

In reply to casi34's message of 5 Feb 2026:
I don't have the expertise to understand all the logs, but this caught my attention:

02:48:23 (333): wrapper: running run_atlas (--nthreads 1)
[2026-01-29 02:48:23] Arguments: --nthreads 1

Don't ATLAS tasks require more than one thread to run?
I don't think so. I used to run them single threaded, could never get them to run multi-threaded under WSL2. Now they fail even single threaded and I don't know why. It's been a while since I ran them so the app may have gone through some revisions.

This is part of the newer BOINC versions.
On your systems with BOINC 8.2.8 BOINC wil check during startup, whether WSL is available, just like it checks whether VBox is available.
When WSL is availlable it also checks which (default) distro is used.
In the (far) future the BOINC-team will probably switch from VBox to WSL containers.

WSL containers and VirtualBox can't be used at the same time on a host, cause VBox don't run when Windows Hyper-V is enabled.
Only Theory can make use of WSL at he moment. If you want to run all three (Theory, ATLAS and CMS) stay with VirtualBox.

CMS mostly seem to be working ok.
That's wrong.
Your CMS VMs are running empty tasks without any scientific value.
As said, this is because of an error in CERN's backend queue which does not send out any scientific job.
You can't do anything against it as it must be solved by CERN staff after their holidays.

Indicators are:
1. short runtimes
2. CMS Grafana pages:
https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/cms_job.php

https://monit-grafana.cern.ch/d/o3dI49GMz/cms-job-monitoring-12m?viewPanel=49&orgId=11&var-group_by=CMS_JobType&var-Tier=All&var-CMS_WMTool=All&var-CMS_SubmissionTool=All&var-CMS_CampaignType=All&var-Site=T3_CH_Volunteer&var-Site=T3_CH_CMSAtHome&var-Type=All&var-CMS_JobType=All&var-CMSPrimaryDataTier=All&var-adhoc=data.RecordTime%7C%3E%7Cnow-7d&var-ScheddName=All&from=now-7d&to=now


If you want to deliver work with scientific value, switch to Theory.

Same here too. Got more than a dozen tasks cancelled while running for hours (some >50% in progress). Some did get cancel before the tasks ran and I'm fine with that.

In addition, got tasks with validation error but it was only a few minutes of running, so that's not as bad when compare to those already running for hours and then got cancelled.
https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/workunit.php?wuid=237892957
https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/workunit.php?wuid=237896161
https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/workunit.php?wuid=237891554

Can anyone confirm this?
Yes.
There's nothing we can do on the BOINC side.

Hi!
I've been away for a while. Now I see that the file eventLoopHeartBeat.txt in the [...]/boinc-client/slots/?*/PanDA_Pilot-* directory is no more constantly updated, so it always reports "1 event read so far". It's possible to find multiple updated eventLoopHeartBeat.txt files, one for each worker, in [...]/boinc-client/slots/?*/PanDA_Pilot-*/athenaMP-workers-EVNTtoHITS-sim/worker_?* subdirs. However you have to sum up the number of events to get the total...

I don't think this has been done on purpose, am I wrong?
--
Bye, Lem