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

[Doug]

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

Yeah, it is still totally unusable for my 12 years old gtx 460m that runs at 50MHz with nouveau

[kozman]

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

I will do you one better. It should be law that both the firmware and driver source for discontinued products be released either at EOL or after 10 years since the product was released. This will do more to keep abandoned products out of the landfill and give hobbyists and enthusiasts the right to keep a dead product alive if they so choose. Tack this law squarely onto the Right To Repair law in EVERY COUNTRY!

[kozman]

How long do you wanna bet before NVidia gets this software and works to lock it out of 5000 series and later? I hear the sound of cash registers and eBay transactions off in the distance already.

[direc85]

Nvidia GeForce 4 MX

I'm not sure if this is a good thing, as in, will this speed up Nvidia opening up any locks? No. Well, I keep my thumbs up for the open source driver community to find a way to reclock the GPUs now, if nothing else, to prove a point. They lead the market it raytracing and AI, it wouldn't hurt them to let older cards be reclocked.

It's sad really how locked down the GPU firmware business is. Yeah I get it, but still... I hope Nvidia sees how good for AMD it has been to have *two* high-quality open source drivers - one of which is official, mind you. Not saying Nvidia drivers are of bad quality; they have worked well for me in the past and seem to work well in the present day too!

Nvidia is a big ship. I wish it would turn a little faster...

Wait. This was for BIOS, it may or may not have anything to do with firmware loading...right?

[bug77]

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.

As far as I understood, it's really just a modification to the existing NvFlash utility. Probably not of direct use to Nouveau, but they could debug that and gain some insight or inspect some previously inaccessible registers and stuff.

[ms178]

As I don't like how the manufacturers lock down GPUs these days, I very much welcome such a hack. I hope AMD is also on their radar, RDNA2 and RDNA3 also deserve such a treatment.

[kiffmet]

The day, AMD vBIOS signature verification gets cracked, or when the signing keys/AMD internal software for creating signed pptables (der8auer has a copy) get leaked, is the day I'll celebrate. It's reassuring to see that entry points and circumventions to device manufacturers taking away true ownership from the buyers' hardware are being found eventually.

[ElectricPrism]

Schrodinger's GPU, maybe someday you'll be able to use what you paid for -- maybe you wont or it will be so far in the future it won't matter.

Best to avoid feeding & riding the tiger -- when you dismount you're just tiger food.

[kozman]

The day, AMD vBIOS signature verification gets cracked, or when the signing keys/AMD internal software for creating signed pptables (der8auer has a copy) get leaked, is the day I'll celebrate. It's reassuring to see that entry points and circumventions to device manufacturers taking away true ownership from the buyers' hardware are being found eventually.

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.

[NeoMorpheus]

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

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.