NVIDIA To Begin Publishing Open GPU Documentation

[dee.]

The blobs run exclusively on the graphics card.

What harm can they do there?

Famous last words. What's the worst that could happen?

How about screen capture of user data? Creation of backdoors... security holes... etc.

Also, I'm not the only one worried about the security of nvidia's blobs... just look at the mailing list.

[RealNC]

This can actually be bad news. It might mean that NVidia plans to abandon multimedia and desktop PC support with their binary driver and instead focus on 3D workstations. Like AMD with Catalyst. The result would be open drivers that are too slow, or binary drivers that suck.

[Sonadow]

Yes, that sounds entirely reasonable. I'm sure we'll all be happy with NSA-approved firmware blobs in our open drivers...

Go ahead then, show me your almighty machine don't use the following h/w:

• a proper motherboard (BIOS firmware blob)
• x86 CPUs (x86 microcode blob loaded on boot)
• Atheros Wifi cards (firmware blob)
• Ralink Wifi cards (firmware blob)
• Intel Wifi cards (firmware blob)
• AMD GPUs (firmware blobs)

Don't have such a machine? Then zip it.

[Sonadow]

This can actually be bad news. It might mean that NVidia plans to abandon multimedia and desktop PC support with their binary driver and instead focus on 3D workstations. Like AMD with Catalyst. The result would be open drivers that are too slow, or binary drivers that suck.

Nothing wrong with that. Nvidia's main business has always been the professional segment. And with Nvidia making the binary firmware available under a permissive redistribution license means that the Nouveau drivers stand to benefit in the form of better capabilities + performance.

[bridgman]

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archive...er/014497.html

That's something different though -- not the microcode doing bad things, but the microcode providing an interface which allows the driver to potentially do bad things.

I'm not saying it's impossible for microcode on a GPU to do bad things on its own, but it sure would be hard to fit something like that into the relatively tiny microcode images.

[RealNC]

Nothing wrong with that. Nvidia's main business has always been the professional segment. And with Nvidia making the binary firmware available under a permissive redistribution license means that the Nouveau drivers stand to benefit in the form of better capabilities + performance.

NVidia's and AMD's Windows drivers for consumer GPUs are heavily game focused. (Read their changelogs; they're full of "15% more performance in game X" notes.) I'm hoping that if Valve is successful in building a new market for major game publishers, we're gonna see the same thing happening on Linux. We know that the open drivers are not gonna do that, since it's a major effort that needs lots of time and people.

[chithanh]

The blobs run exclusively on the graphics card.

What harm can they do there?

PCI/PCIe cards can access main memory via DMA: http://it.slashdot.org/story/10/11/2...d-demonstrated
And IOMMUs provide only limited protection against this.

[dee.]

Go ahead then, show me your almighty machine don't use the following h/w:

• a proper motherboard (BIOS firmware blob)
• x86 CPUs (x86 microcode blob loaded on boot)
• Atheros Wifi cards (firmware blob)
• Ralink Wifi cards (firmware blob)
• Intel Wifi cards (firmware blob)
• AMD GPUs (firmware blobs)

Don't have such a machine? Then zip it.

So apparently you consider pouring gasoline over to be an acceptable method of putting out fires?

[MartinN]

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archive...er/014497.html

Sounds a little paranoid, but still warranted as the potential for abuse is wide open. Apart from asking them to fully open source everything, issues like this can be solved legally in the interim - where NVidia can vouch for the blob's functionality and lack of any backdoors or intentional abuses that can be discovered via subpoenas (and punished accordingly if they do not live up to their end of the agreement) but not otherwise, if something were to happen.

Once burned twice shy, yes, but let's not be so unforgiving so as to question -everyone's- motives and give NVidia credit for their show of good will here. Not saying they are saints, but since Linus' finger showing, there has been a change of attitude.

yep, it does feel chilly in here as someone else pointed out...

[dee.]

Sounds a little paranoid, but still warranted as the potential for abuse is wide open. Apart from asking them to fully open source everything, issues like this can be solved legally in the interim - where NVidia can vouch for the blob's functionality and lack of any backdoors or intentional abuses that can be discovered via subpoenas (and punished accordingly if they do not live up to their end of the agreement) but not otherwise, if something were to happen.

Post-Snowden, we should all realize that we can't trust any legal safeguards in these kinds of matters, at least for US-based companies (and probably also at least UK, Sweden and Canada). We already know that NSA can give secret orders to companies to install backdoors to their products, and then order them not to disclose this to anyone. It's a full-on totalitarian society. They already did this to most proprietary encryption software.

No, the only guarantee is total openness of all system-level code. We can't trust the law to protect us from totalitarian spying.

Once burned twice shy, yes, but let's not be so unforgiving so as to question -everyone's- motives and give NVidia credit for their show of good will here. Not saying they are saints, but since Linus' finger showing, there has been a change of attitude.

Like said, it's not a matter of Nvidia's motives. They may not have any choice in the matter.