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

[zexelon]

Or avoid that bullshit by giving your money to a company that provides proper open source support, instead of pushing anticonsumer practices over and over.

Wait what company is that? Literally every company prioritizes profits over all else. Its what they are there to do. Sure some may do this off the backs of the FOSS community under the presence of being open source, but really they are after ideologically free labor... really its pure genius on the corps part to use the religious zealotry of the FOSS community to get free labor by putting out a few "free strings".

Nvidia has simply done the weight and balance and found no need to go through the meat grinder of FOSS... they make up to 1,000% profit on some of their hardware (H100) these days... so they are happy to employ large dev groups and keep everything under lock and key. Totally okay with that!

Its called capitalism and its the worst form of society... except for all the others.

[ElectricPrism]

I concur. When you buy something, software should not prevent it from truly being your property. This is just "secret sauce" stuff that NVidia and AMD don't want us / each other to know because *GASP* we'll likely find out that IP is being infringed upon. Because yeah, they did this to protect us from fake cards or ourselves. Mmm hmm.

This reminds me of the fight club formula calculation -- if the cost of settlements on infringing private IP is less than the income generated by infringing -- infringing will continue.

[dragon321]

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

It's actually otherwise. Nouveau is usable only for older hardware (I hope that will change after GSP support will be finished). I have an old Macbook with Nvidia GPU. If it wasn't for Nouveau I would need to choose between official Nvidia drivers that weren't updated for years or no acceleration. Nouveau even without reclocking provides performance that is able to give me pretty smooth desktop without installing old drivers. I can also run Wayland compositors without issues.

As for the topic it sounds promising but I believe that Nouveau developers said they would be able to do some hacky things and get firmware from Nvidia driver to provide reclocking but that would be legally difficult and they want to keep Nouveau free from any legal issues so I guess they won't be interested in this as well.

[bug77]

This reminds me of the fight club formula calculation -- if the cost of settlements on infringing private IP is less than the income generated by infringing -- infringing will continue.

Great quote. Based on a gross misrepresentation of a document Ford used in their Pinto snafu, but why let details stand in the way of a good hating?

And let's not forget this measure has actually curbed the sale of GPUs flashed as something better than they were. Now that practice is going to make comeback, ready your "Nvidia doesn't protect its customers from counterfeiters" song.

[QwertyChouskie]

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

From what I understand, the shader compiler is the main issue on cards that don't have reclocking issues. The new "NAK" Rust-written shader compiler should fix the major performance issues from what I understand.

[ElectricPrism]

bug77 with salt like that you could feed one of these bad boys for a decade.

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[kozman]

This reminds me of the fight club formula calculation -- if the cost of settlements on infringing private IP is less than the income generated by infringing -- infringing will continue.

Yup. There was a famous case where....Ford?....did something like this. The cost of putting in seatbelts to lawsuits from people going through the windshield from car not having seatbelts. It was at the highest levels of the company that this decision was made. It cost them dearly.

[QwertyChouskie]

Wait what company is that? Literally every company prioritizes profits over all else. Its what they are there to do. Sure some may do this off the backs of the FOSS community under the presence of being open source, but really they are after ideologically free labor... really its pure genius on the corps part to use the religious zealotry of the FOSS community to get free labor by putting out a few "free strings".

If the drivers are cheaper to develop, and FOSS; that's a win-win. You make it sound like this is some sort of bad thing. The way Mesa drivers all use shared infrastructure makes it so that many improvements/optimizations improve all drivers, rather than just the driver for one GPU vendor. Every man-hour not spent duplicating work that already exists is a man-hour that can be put towards new improvements and innovations.

[tildearrow]

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

Let's be honest: nouveau was made without help from NVIDIA.

[bug77]

Yup. There was a famous case where....Ford?....did something like this. The cost of putting in seatbelts to lawsuits from people going through the windshield from car not having seatbelts. It was at the highest levels of the company that this decision was made. It cost them dearly.

Proves my point perfectly.
It was Ford, but it had nothing to do with seatbelts, it was about the gas tank. It was not about refusing to implement something, it was about pointing out the recommended modifications were excessive (they agreed to do what they deemed made sense). And it was not their decision to make, it was their argument with NHTSA recommendation. They did what they were told to do after presenting their arguments. Other than that, you're spot on.

(Look it up if you don't believe me, the document is available to the public and it's only 7 page long.)