In reply to [AF>Le_Pommier] Jerome_C2005's message of 13 Jun 2026:
......

But if there are macOS tasks with docker/podman I may give it a try (I had managed to run some boinc central tasks successfully, after some fight though)I see the application Intel 64-bit Mac OS 10.5 or later 302.10 (docker) (beta test) is available, so if you tick "Run test applications?" in your preferences, you could give it a try.

In reply to computezrmle's message of 12 Jun 2026:
Some suggestions...
3.
Stop smoking
Ok. But there was no need for that... I am not asking for anything, much less demanding it.
I will answer only to your suggestion #3: "Just try to live in Lithuania for... a week. You will start smoking immediately." :)

I'm running the nightly one and its good, they didn't change the code the way I did but same out comes.

https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/results.php?hostid=9930009&offset=0&show_names=0&state=4&appid=13

I guess there should be a request for a v23

In reply to Toby Broom's message of 4 Jun 2026:
I have an overide in appconfig for the VM that it has 1.5 GB to aviod this, I think its just a bad WU?
OK. That might be the case.

In reply to Pascal's message of 29 May 2026:
... could you give me a step-by-step description. ...
My previous post describes the steps you need to do.

For example #3:
Use an editor you are familiar with and modify /etc/cvmfs/default.local as follows:
- add 'alice.cern.ch' to the repository list
- remove 'geant4.cern.ch'

For example #4:
Use an editor you are familiar with and modify /etc/cvmfs/default.local as follows:
Add 'CVMFS_USE_CDN=yes'

Similar with the other numbers.
I will not explain how to create a file, open a file in an arbitrary text editor, enter a line, modify some text, remove another line, save the file ...

... if I understood correctly, you have to install cvmfs + podman and that’s it.
Is the installation of CVMFS for podman identical to the one used to do the theory native tasks?
The docker/podman app replaced the older Theory native app.
Podman (or docker) is a MUST HAVE to run this app.

A local CVMFS is recommended as it avoids a lot of network traffic but it is independent from Podman.
If you don't install it, a CVMFS inside the container will be used.
If you decide to use CVMFS on the host it MUST be correctly configured!
As for CVMFS you got the links with step by step instructions and comments in your task logs.

Done its https://github.com/BOINC/boinc/issues/7100

Finally got the server to take back my finished Dockers and give me some new ones ....nothing at -dev yet

I used to get very long Theory work units, such as some more than 12 hours (on a 2 year old CPU) such as sent dates April 5, 13, 30 and May 1 and 8 (such as https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/result.php?resultid=435330784). Some long tasks included those with Input file metadata indicating pythia8, sherpa, herwig, powheg-box, and likely other subtypes.

Since May 8, all work units complete in usually under an hour and a few within about 3-4 hours on that same PC system,

Has the generation of the long work units changed or is it just random over time?

Just wondering whether we still need to request a red message in the Event Log to warn users when a specific task may take a very long time to run.

Sadly, that's not the same problem. It completed on my end successfully and the task has online the status 'Completed, waiting for validation' but it has been waiting for 10 days.
Some tasks had similar results, but they got sent out again to another user, and when that was done, it finished up.
But here it seems that the sending-out part was not generated successfully.

I don't have htop inside the container so I just used top e.g.

podman exec -it ed746bb7ffd4 top -n1

Tasks: 17 total, 2 running, 15 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie %Cpu(s): 0.4 us, 24.3 sy, 72.5 ni, 2.9 id, 0.0 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.0 si, 0.0 st MiB Mem : 511227.9 total, 447688.1 free, 53287.8 used, 17278.2 buff/cache MiB Swap: 8192.0 total, 8192.0 free, 0.0 used. 457940.1 avail Mem PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 965 boinc 30 10 635044 269404 14120 R 100.0 0.1 3196:45 Herwig

Since I have more than 1 container I used podman ps to get the ID (ed746bb7ffd4 ) that I was intrested in.

Very cool. I had a bot modify it to run in wsl.
I am attached to 2 very slow huge tasks at the moment.
Both are over 26 hrs old and still chewing.

When you install a local CVMFS on MacOS this is what 'cvmfs_config setup' originally does (copied from the CVMFS source code):
# Since MacOS 10.15 Catalina it is not possible anymore (without disabling # SIP) create directory in root `/`. # We decide to move the standard installation directory on # `/Users/shared/cvmfs` instead of `/cvmfs` # In order to keep the standard CVMFS mountpoint, we decide to implement # firmlinks from `/cvmfs` to `/Users/shared/cvmfs` if compare_versions $(sw_vers -productVersion) -ge "10.15"; then mkdir -p /Users/shared/cvmfs chown cvmfs:cvmfs /Users/shared/cvmfs chmod 777 /Users/shared/cvmfs if ! grep -q "^cvmfs\t" /etc/synthetic.conf 2> /dev/null ; then echo -e "# The line below was autogenerated by CernVM-FS, do not delete nor edit" >> /etc/synthetic.conf echo -e "cvmfs\t/Users/Shared/cvmfs" >> /etc/synthetic.conf fi # reload synthetic.conf - seems to return nonzero status code even on success /System/Library/Filesystems/apfs.fs/Contents/Resources/apfs.util -t || true else echo "Fuse4x and autofs bug" > /dev/null mkdir -p /cvmfs chown cvmfs:cvmfs /cvmfs chmod 777 /cvmfs fi
To run Theory (docker) without a local CVMFS you MUST ensure '/cvmfs' is present since the container requires it as mountpoint.
So, manually run the relevant commands from the source code above as admin, then reboot:
mkdir -p /Users/shared/cvmfs chmod 777 /Users/shared/cvmfs if ! grep -q "^cvmfs\t" /etc/synthetic.conf 2> /dev/null; then echo -e "cvmfs\t/Users/Shared/cvmfs" >> /etc/synthetic.conf; fi
The part between 'if' and 'fi' must be run as one command without a newline that may be inserted by the forum software here!
If you get permission issues you may not be admin!
In this case, consult your manual or visit MacOS related websites.

It's working fine.

The environment proxy is nice to have for CMS (only) since CMS requests many objects from a distinct CERN webserver (but by far the most from CVMFS!). Theory does not use any data not provided via CVMFS.

Since the scripts were developed for CMS but are now also used for Theory you get that message about the missing environment proxy.
The reason is not the script but a missing tool at Theory (VM as well as podman image).
So far it makes no sense to install that tool on Theory.
Just focus on CVMFS and ignore the message.

In reply to computezrmle's message of 20 Apr 2026:
Toby Broom already mentioned that the VirtualBox app will not run on your Mx Mac (since the guest is x86_64 based).

What may run is the Theory docker app, but it reports an error since it requires /cvmfs to test whether a local CVMFS client is available.
Although running a local CVMFS would be the preferred solution I suggest to first test the following method.

Creating a subfolder directly under '/' seems to be a pain on MacOS.
See here for a possible solution and report if it works:
https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome//forum_thread.php?id=6481&postid=53450

Thanks computezrmle,

I'll see what I can do.

Name Theory_2922-4881498-693
Anwendung Theory Simulation
batch 19854517
erstellt 6 Mar 2026, 12:21:50 UTC
Mindestanzahl 1
Anfängliche Kopien 1
max # von Fehler/Gesamt/Erfolg Aufgaben 3, 3, 1
Fehler Zu viele Ergebnisse insgesamt
Command line
Priority 0
Job instances
Aufgabe
anklicken für Einzelheiten Computer Gesendet Meldezeit
oder Ablaufdatum
Erklärung Status Laufzeit
(sek) CPU Zeit
(sek) Punkte Anwendung
433463131 10870847 7 Mar 2026, 1:17:10 UTC 14 Mar 2026, 9:37:54 UTC Abgebrochen 627,659.94 595,418.10 --- Theory Simulation v302.10 (docker)
windows_x86_64
433857762 10915803 14 Mar 2026, 12:17:41 UTC 25 Mar 2026, 7:45:25 UTC Abgebrochen 137,481.22 112,932.80 --- Theory Simulation v302.10 (docker)
windows_x86_64
434120529 10797673 25 Mar 2026, 10:45:38 UTC 8 Apr 2026, 7:52:12 UTC Abgebrochen 1,197,623.06 1,139,443.00 --- Theory Simulation v302.10 (docker)
windows_x86_64
Input files

if you run boinc as the boinc user you might need to make the config global e.g.

/etc/containers/containers.conf

or put the the boinc users folder., wherever this might be for your install.

I also faked that VirtualBox is installed as alternate

New-Item "C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\virtualbox.exe" New-Item -Path "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Oracle\VirtualBox" New-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Oracle\VirtualBox" -Name "Version" -Value "7.2.2" -PropertyType "String" New-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Oracle\VirtualBox" -Name "VersionExt" -Value "7.2.2" -PropertyType "String" New-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Oracle\VirtualBox" -Name "InstallDir" -Value "C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\" -PropertyType "String"

Seems like the don't use vbox would stop the tasks being sent from server.

The wrapper is part of the main BOINC code base:

https://github.com/BOINC/boinc

Its maintained.

MadGraph5

These types of tasks are rare, but I see the same scenario on one of my PCs.
1. For about half an hour, there is some activity in the VM: Guest shows some CPU load, it downloads around 200 MB, and writes about 100 MB to the disk.
2. After that, Guest activity drops to zero, all performance graphs are flat, and the task log file becomes unreachable.

Here is an excerpt from the log:
===> [runRivet] Wed Apr 8 07:03:39 AM UTC 2026 [boinc pp zinclusive 13000 -,-,200 - madgraph5amc 2.7.2.atlas3...] ... ValueError: unsupported hash type md5 AttributeError : 'module' object has no attribute 'md5' ... ERROR: missing LHE output file: /scratch/tmp/tmp.UjcDJkl2wh/MG5RUN/Events/run_01/unweighted_events.lhe ... [2]+ 2535 Running ( $rivetExecString; exit $? ) & ERROR: fail to run madgraph5amc 2.7.2.atlas3 or Rivet (error exit code)
My preliminary, but not yet firm conclusion: The simulation never started because the angry Python strangled everything, maybe even itself. :)
My action: Brick therapy for that VM.

P.S. For those who are experienced or have real knowledge – please comment, is this "Brick therapy" a correct solution?