NVIDIA BIOS Signature Lock Broken - What Caused Open-Source Pains For Years

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NVIDIA BIOS Signature Lock Broken - What Caused Pains For The Open-Source Driver For Yea

New (Windows) tools have been released that break the NVIDIA BIOS Signature Lock, the "security" functionality in use since the GeForce GTX 900 days around signed firmware/BIOS handling. This authentication mechanism is what in turn has led to the GeForce GTX 700 series still being the best supported series by the open-source Nouveau driver while the GTX 900 series and later have been crippled to their low boot clock speeds due to PMU/re-clocking restrictions. While Nouveau developers have been working on the GPU System Processor (GSP) approach for RTX 20 "Turing" GPUs and newer to workaround this limitation as NVIDIA's blessed path forward, the NVIDIA BIOS Signature Lock has now been broken by Windows modders...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-Lock-Broken

[tildearrow]

Yay! I honestly don't care about "legal gray". It's not dark area, so let's use this and finally reclock for Nouveau/NVK...

[mirmirmir]

It should be required by law for companies to release firmware source after a product is no longer supported

[bemerk]

The question is, if this is actually useful for nouveau. Can you use such a tool to gain insight of the reclocking process? Is it worth the hassle? Don't you taint yourself and make your code unacceptable for Mesa&Kernel? We need some insight from developers here.

[bemerk]

It should be required by law for companies to release firmware source after a product is no longer supported

and documentation and driver /application code yes.
Working upstream before product release instead of keeping your own fork would be even greater. Be it Android or Linux Kernel work or whatever else you can base your stuff on.

[erniv2]

In other news! Aliexpress starts sellings 3080 RTX cards at bargin prices, turned out they where reflashed 2060s and crash when a game requires dlss2 ~~.

[QwertyChouskie]

In other news! Aliexpress starts sellings 3080 RTX cards at bargin prices, turned out they where reflashed 2060s and crash when a game requires dlss2 ~~.

They already do that, just usually based on 400 series chips.

[erniv2]

They already do that, just usually based on 400 series chips.

I know the classic is the 1060 thats actually a 730, i just wanted to point it out .

[justinkb]

Let's be honest, nouveau never was that good, even for GPUs which weren't locked down

[bemerk]

It is a lot more work if you don't get help by the original company and if you then hit a roadblock like signed firmware that prevents you from reclocking and figuring stuff out by testing various firmware changes, you loose interest.