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

[Caturba]

NVIDIA's public reasoning was to prevent fraudulent individuals/companies from flashing a vBIOS of a higher-end graphics card onto a lower-end product to sell it at a premium as if it were the higher-end product.

The degree of "premium" is mostly defined by fuses burnt of the GPU during production, not vBIOS.

[jonwil]

My understanding in regards to Noveau using the official firmware for these cards is that the firmware is built into the binary blob drivers in a way that makes it basically impossible to pull them out in a form Noveau could upload to the cards and have work.

[Caturba]

My understanding in regards to Noveau using the official firmware for these cards is that the firmware is built into the binary blob drivers in a way that makes it basically impossible to pull them out in a form Noveau could upload to the cards and have work.

In this case, the title is incorrect. The driver does have encrypted microcode for various engines on the GPU, but it has nothing to do with VBIOS.

[Beryesa]

I wonder if there's any update on this 🤔