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This is why we need piracy/open source scenes. I'm sure the Nouveau people wouldn't encur a copyright strike if say someone forked their driver and implemented it outside of the Nouveau dev team to then publish it somewhere it won't get taken down.
I think we need illegal source code because of how the right of ownership has been steadily dismantled by industries at large and set as an industrial precedent in hardware.
Seize the means of computing.
legality doesn't mean morality. Corporates have made moral things illegal.
Yet they won't... not unless law forces them to.
✊
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
With the NVIDIA BIOS Signature Lock being broken, a Windows utility was released today that allows for cross-flashing BIOS images on graphics cards, raising power limits on pre-Turing GPUs, and have more control around the graphics card's voltages, fan curve, and other attributes.
The Windows tools are OMGVflash and NVflashk for supporting vBIOS modding and cross-flashing with newer generations of GPUs.
The GeForce GTX 700 series is the last generation of cards to work well with the Nouveau open-source driver and not be contingent upon any extra signed firmware blobs for initialization.
Additionally, the Nouveau developers continuing to work on their kernel DRM driver are currently focused on getting the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP) support in place for better handling RTX 20 series and newer hardware.
But it sure would be nice if things were still like the GeForce GTX 700 days and prior that allowed for better open-source driver support without having to worry about the security/authentication requirements.
The original article contains 442 words, the summary contains 188 words. Saved 57%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Can someone ELI5 why this is important? Is there something wrong with NVIDIA drivers?
It's important because now you can take full control of stats that you weren't able to because of the lock.
And it migh be good for linux because since the 900 series gpu, or since the lock were first implemented, the open source nvidia driver it's not able to re-clock the gpu with an higher clock than the boot one (and trust me it's a really low clock) and you are not able to use a quarter of the power the gpu has.
Even if the code is 100% equals the nvidia one, literally copy pasted, it would not work because the firmware need to be signed by nvidia to do so.
Oh man.
I'm gonna destroy my card again aren't I?
Here we go again!
It's not the drivers, but rather the BIOS. Nvidia have set various limits to power, voltage, etc. in there and now modders will be able to unlock those by flashing the vBIOS with a modified version.
This means we get to use our Nvidia cards now like the AMD? In linux I mean
Whether this lock being broken will have any meaningful impact on the Nouveau developers remains to be seen
Unless something changed since it was first posted it was described as the flasher binary on Windows having a built in bypass. They used that to enable flashing anything to any card. They did not reverse engineer the signature check algorithm or actually crack it.
One dude traced the binary to the point in code execution where he found the bypass. The other dude tried to do some more complicated methods of finding the bypass and then rushed to release whatever he had because the other dude found it in one sitting.
It doesn't sound to me like this would be very helpful other than trying other signed firmware on a card.