NVIDIA Begins Requiring Signed GPU Firmware Images 192
An anonymous reader writes: In a blow to those working on open-source drivers, soft-mods for enhancing graphics cards, and the Chinese knock-offs of graphics cards, NVIDIA has begun signing and validating GPU firmware images. With the latest-generation Maxwell GPUs, not all engine functionality is being exposed unless the hardware detects the firmware image was signed by NVIDIA. This is a setback to the open-source Nouveau Linux graphics driver but they're working towards a solution where NVIDIA can provide signed, closed-source firmware images to the driver project for redistribution. Initially the lack of a signed firmware image will prevent some thermal-related bits from being programmed but with future hardware the list of requirements is expected to rise.
Alibaba (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Alibaba (Score:4, Interesting)
They are selling nvidia cards with a modded firmware? Why? Nvidia is going to change their hardware, and hardware will only accept signed firmware. Fake cards, can choose to simply not do any signature checks on their hardware. Unless the fake cards are real nvidia cards, which for some reason run a modded firmware instead of nvidia singed firmwares, this will have no effect on them.
This is to simply prevent modding. Modded firmware often pushed the hardware beyond the recommended limits. This is more like some of the android phones only accepting signed firmware.
Re:Alibaba (Score:5, Informative)
I don't think you understand what these fake cards are.
They are legitimate $80 nvidia cards, flashed with modded firmware to enable cores and clock speeds that the silicon is incapable of handling (Hence why the chip became an $80 card in the first place, instead of a $300 card).
The modder then puts the flashed $80 card on e-bay for $200 and makes a sweet profit.
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flashed with modded firmware to enable cores and clock speeds that the silicon is incapable of handling
How do you know the silicon is incapable of handling higher speeds? For all we know, the hardware is capable of the speed, but the official nvidia bios intentionally degrades the speed so nvidia can sell at a lower price.
that's sorta the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
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they are capable for a little while. Usually the 90 days to get out of any warranty work. Maybe a few of 'em even run at the clock freqs without crashing. It's not just clock freq either. Nvidia shuts off broken cores in software. You're games might run but they'll crash a lot. What Nvidia's worried about is that You'll blame them for a buggy card and go buy AMD. It has major brand damage potential especially with Alibaba about to become a household word what with their IPO.
Why would I not buy AMD anyway?
Re:that's sorta the problem (Score:5, Informative)
You don't understand. All companies, AMD and Nvidia manufacture certain chips. Each chip has certain failure rates. When certain amount of cores fails, they are switched off in software and sold for less.
AMD does this. Nvidia does this. Pretty much everyone making complex chips does this. It's massively uneconomical to throw away an entire chip over partial failures.
Re:that's sorta the problem (Score:5, Informative)
You aren't understanding. Since it was explained fairly clearly, I'd guess you don't want to understand. But I'll try again anyway.
These chips are broken. So they are sold cheap. You don't want to pay full price for seconds. Before they sell them, they use software to set the broken parts as not working. Some of them aren't broken enough that you'll immediately notice, but that doesn't mean they aren't broken.
Usually the breaks are only in one area. Some die didn't burn properly, or traces weren't properly laid down. Whatever. So that area is sealed off. The manufacturer doesn't do a detailed investigation of exactly what's broken, just one that's good enough so they can figure out what needs to be sealed off to have a working chip. Then the sell the working chip (with reduced functionality) for a much cheaper price.
So if you don't need the full functions of the chip, you can buy the cheaper, reduced functionality, model at a cheaper price.
IC manufacturers have been doing this since the i8086, or maybe the i80186. (Intel was the first one I ever heard of doing it.)
This is a deal for those who don't need the functionality of the full model. It also cuts the prices for those that do, as selling the seconds defrays some of the cost of manufacturing.
Those who are removing the imposed limits and selling the seconds as if they were first quality are the ones who are cheating the customers. They are also impugning the name of the original manufacturer.
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On the other hand, it might equally well be price discrimination where they turn off perfectly working features just to be able to sell the same product to different people for a different price. Who knows?
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Maybe if it was explained with a less technical product they'd get it.
It's like when you go into Bulk Barn and there are broken chocolate bar bits for less than the cost of a wrapped, branded chocolate bar.
They are still yummy, but not able to be sold for full price. So they sell them at a reduced price to get some return on them.
Now I'm craving chocolate.
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On the other hand, it might equally well be price discrimination where they turn off perfectly working features just to be able to sell the same product to different people for a different price. Who knows?
Does it matter? The product is different, whether the inaccessible bits are working or not is irrelevant. It isn't price discrimination because the product is different.
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On the other hand, it might equally well be price discrimination
So what you're saying is, if you sold a computer on ebay and said "This computers CPU fan is bad - you MUST replace the CPU fan before use!!!" you are admitting to criminal fraud simply because I should somehow expect a working CPU fan?!
How on earth does that even make sense?
How does you reply even make sense? This has nothing to do with what I wrote.
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On the other hand, it might equally well be price discrimination where they turn off perfectly working features just to be able to sell the same product to different people for a different price. Who knows?
Does it matter? The product is different, whether the inaccessible bits are working or not is irrelevant. It isn't price discrimination because the product is different.
The real questions are: Should the consumer (or some reselller?) be allowed to turn the working features back on? Is it OK if NVIDIA tries to prevent this with code signing? If the features are actually broken, than these questions are of less relevance.
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The real questions are: Should the consumer (or some reselller?) be allowed to turn the working features back on? Is it OK if NVIDIA tries to prevent this with code signing?
Well I would say yes to both questions. nVidia can "turn them off" however they like and the user can try to turn them on however they like.
Re:that's sorta the problem (Score:4, Informative)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning
Chips are designed for the max freq of the specification. If they fail that spec, they are retested at a lower spec, and if they pass that spec, they are sold at that frequency. Why else do you find many diffrent chips in the same family run at diffrent speeds?
Many times the chip is %100 capable of running at faster speeds, but they had too much of the higher bin, and not enough of the lower bin.
But yes, taking a chip that didn't pass a higher speed, flashing it to the firmware of its faster/more capable cousin, and then selling it as such is ripping people off.
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What people are missing is that market segmentation is what counts, not how many chips fall into which bins. If the company sells ten times as many inexpensive GPUs as expensive ones, but the yield on the production floor is more like ten good chips for every crippled one, then it's not hard to imagine that most of the cheap cards will end up with perfect chips.
The market detects this sales strategy as bullshit and routes around it.
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What people are missing is that market segmentation is what counts, not how many chips fall into which bins. If the company sells ten times as many inexpensive GPUs as expensive ones, but the yield on the production floor is more like ten good chips for every crippled one, then it's not hard to imagine that most of the cheap cards will end up with perfect chips. The market detects this sales strategy as bullshit and routes around it.
The truth is somewhere in between. For example the nVidia GTX 980 now sells with 16/16(?) SMMs enabled for 16*128 = 2048 cores. The GTX 970 sells with 13/16 SMMs for 13*128 = 1664 cores. It is extremely unlikely that no actual cards have 14 or 15 working SMMs. Card makers probably do some more binning to see which chips they can up their OC editions and which they put in their reference editions too. The question is how good is your validation versus their validation, if it runs through 3DMark okay does it
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Mod parent up.
There also better solutions than code signing if it were only about preventing people from getting silicon with broken cores sold as fully functional: Just publish the test result with the serial number.
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Then you'd have people ransacking stores looking for serial #'s that test above their price level, buy them all up and resell them after unlocking them. Instead, perhaps publish a serial #/model catalog. That works so long as the serial # on the card is relatively tamper-evident, and the manufacture has to be ok with essentially exposing their exact manufacturing numbers. Probably not especially palatable.
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They could be open and sell each chip at its fair market price for its level of functionality. Chips sold at the wrong price level can only happen if they *do* price discrimination. On the other hand, if product binning were the only reason as claimed by some posters this could not happen - there would be no chips sold at the wrong price.
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You have a pretty big "if" statement. We have no clue on nVidia's yield rate is, and especially not compared to their sales model. What we do know is that at least *some* of the chips will not funciton as advertised.
which gets us back to why nVidia is signing firmware. They don't want to be associated with products of unknown quality, sold by people who bypass their Quality Control
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Others have tried arguing with you, but I'll make this very plain and answer your questions bluntly, since you seem to lack some of the knowledge they assume you have.
It's not a ripoff - they are selling consumers exactly the performance they are promising.
Manufacturing isn't perfect. They test at the factory to see if each chip can run at the promised core count and clockspeeds. Fairly often, particularly with top-of-the-line chips, a few cores will be broken, or unstable at the specified clock speeds. The
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They work exactly as advertised. They advertise certain amount of cores in certain products. These cores will be functional and enabled. All of them.
There is no ripping off.
This is done by all manufacturers. Yes, including AMD. And Intel. And Nvidia. And all of those ARM chip makers. And pretty much everyone else.
Example: you have a plant that makes hypothetical chip with four cores. You know that 25% of all chips that come off the assembly line have 4 working cores, 25% have 3 working and one faulty, 25% h
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That is what is typically done. This didn't protect against such scams either however, as people did things like manually redrawing bridges on chips to disabled cores and so on.
And in many cases, this is impractical, and it's much more practical to simply have software disable the access to those extra cores. With firmware signing, it's likely safer than burning hardware bridges.
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> This didn't protect against such scams either however, as people did things like manually redrawing bridges on chips to disabled cores and so on.
That's because they were doing things outside the chip packaging, such as putting SMD components (jumper resistors for instance) on the top of the package. It's not hard so solder simple SMD components with a soldering iron, though it is a little harder than reflashing some firmware.
If they make the modifications on the chip die, before packaging, that's goin
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Why would they need to go to such uncomfortable lengths, which would likely make end product cost more for the consumer when same can be reliably done in software on a massive scale with no need to modify physical production?
The trend for last two decades has been to do things more efficiently in software instead of modifying hardware whenever possible due to inherent added flexibility and cost savings of the latter approach.
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Perhaps they should make sure that their products work in the first place.
That's exactly what they are doing, making sure you get the functionality you pay for. I buy my stuff from reputable dealers, in 25yrs I've had exactly one Nvidia card and one ATI card blow up, every other video problem I've ever had has been software related. Both cards were cheerfully replaced under warranty.
AFAIK from personal experience the practice of downgrading faulty chips to a lower spec has been around since the days of maths co-processors, probably longer. And no they don't exhaustively test e
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Re:Alibaba (Score:5, Informative)
Quite often they're not even unlocking anything. Rather they're doing a dirty hack to change the bios information of the card to display something that it isn't. This isn't all that unfamiliar to those of us who were in the industry back in the mid to late 90's when scammers were resilking(cpu info used to be silk screened on, to counter this it's why all cpu's are now stamped) Cyrix cpu's as AMD and Intel. You only found out what the CPU actually was, when you plugged it into the board and it said "cyrix." And while there are cases of people doing this to binned parts, most of the time the links to enable those pathways are cut before they're made into a gpu to stop people from doing exactly that. And if you're wondering why, it's because Intel ran into a massive problem where fly-by-night companies would unlock the binned CPU, and then actually flashing the microcode to change what the CPU was.
The cheap and dirty way to unlock CPU's during that time period was to use a graphite pencil across a unfinished path. I think it was pin 14 or 23 on the board. Very nasty problems with Slot 1 cpus.
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>nVidia will often use some of the same hardware in their lower end cards as they do in their higher end cards, with some functionality throttled or disabled.
Not just Nvida. Everyone in the computer industry bins their silicon the same way. Got an i7 chip with a bad core? you turn it into an i5. got an i7 chip that just doesn't clock very high? It becomes a cheap i7 instead of a K series.
Re:Alibaba (Score:5, Interesting)
They are selling nvidia cards with a modded firmware? Why? Nvidia is going to change their hardware, and hardware will only accept signed firmware. Fake cards, can choose to simply not do any signature checks on their hardware. Unless the fake cards are real nvidia cards, which for some reason run a modded firmware instead of nvidia singed firmwares, this will have no effect on them.
That's exactly what they are. It's pretty trivial to take, say, GTX 440, and reflash the firmware to report that it's a GTX660. It's extremely difficult to make a fake nvidia card that isn't actually an nvidia card that actually works as a video card and isn't completely obviously a fake. The story [slashdot.org] was even on slashdot.
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That is interesting. Thanks for the link
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The thing is, nVidia does not sake "fakes". They relabel their own products and guarantee certain specs.
The 3rd parties sell fakes. They take something like an nVidia card, reflash the bios and resell it as something that is no longer guaranteed by nVidia. They did this before. Take customer card, flashed it as Quadro.
See the problem?
Customers can get shafted in the 2nd version and have no recourse. Then because they are ignorant in the first place, blames nVidia for the fuck up. In the 1st version, the cus
Re: Alibaba (Score:1)
There was this case in which GT440 where modified to report themselfs as GTX660:
http://m.hexus.net/business/ne... [hexus.net]
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f**k nvidia... (Score:2, Insightful)
"NVIDIA, f**k you!" - Linus Torvalds
f**k nvidia... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah. F**k Nvidia for keeping scammers from selling faulty video cards with hacked bios's.
How dare they protect their brand integrity!
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Re:f**k nvidia... (Score:4, Insightful)
Nonsense, it's not on Nvidia to stop fake cards, its on law enforcement. All they are doing is fucking everyone into having to use their signed firmware. Its another avenue for NSA style snooping from public and private parties without you ever knowing. No code reviews, no way to know if that signed firmware is actually what you would've compiled from any code snippets they may provide. No way to know if other functions are being executed from withing the code without your knowledge.
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It's on nVidia to keep people from counterfeiting cards, it's on law enforcement to punish those who do. It's one of those problems you attack from both ends.
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That is why you make it as hard and expensive as possible to crack the protection. Criminal outfits need to turn a profit. Make counterfeiting process hard enough, and their profits dwindle and they go do something more profitable. You win.
Re:f**k nvidia... (Score:4, Funny)
Nonsense, it's not on Nvidia to stop fake cards, its on law enforcement.
Actually, if it cuts their into sales because purchasing NVidia is perceived as risky, then it makes complete commercial sense to make changes to protect people who think they're purchasing NVidia. It's straight dollars and cents.
Now perhaps NVidia is only using this as an excuse to launch their evil conspiracy, but as excuses go, it's completely legit.
(And while I'd love to make fun of you for the evil conspiracy business, the NSA's actual shenanigans have made that impossible. When the utterly improbable has turned out to be true, the completely ridiculous now becomes only highly unlikely...)
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>> it's not on Nvidia to stop fake cards, its on law enforcement.
Its no surprise to me that nVidia feel the need to cover their own asses. Waiting for Law Enforcement to step up is a lame joke in most countries.
I am disappointed that nVidia (at least so far) apparently haven't given the nouveau project the ability to sign or at least proxy-load their own drivers, but on the other hand even after all this time nouveau is (still) a turd that sucks enough to not even just not crash on some nVidia hardwar
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In fairness there's something about it in the release notes, and a workaround that seems farily easy (no dicking around in the command line)
http://www.linuxmint.com/rel_q... [linuxmint.com]
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Thanks for this useful info. I wasn't actually aware that it was a common enough problem that they needed to make a section for it in the release notes, however that just underlines my comments and that it is a singularly inapproriate choice to use nouveau rather than the nVidia blob as the default in a mainstream environment.
I'm sure that most normal people would easily prioritise robustness, performance and functionality over some purist's anal sense of political correctness.
Doesn't look unreasoanble (so far) (Score:4)
So, they're locking out things that can brick the card (flash ROM/fuses, screw up thermal sensors) and apparently a hint of OS security (the Falcons that respond to userspace commands can no longer access physical memory, only virtual memory). The latter sounds somewhat bizarre, considering the firmware should be fully under the control of the driver, not userspace (I guess/hope?), but not unreasonable. Maybe there are software security reasons for this.
Nouveau is free to continue using its own free blobs or to switch to nvidia's. If they start adding restrictions that actively cripple useful features or are DRM nonsense, then I would start complaining, but so far it sounds like an attempt at protecting the hardware while maintaining manufacturing flexibility for nvidia. This isn't much different from devices which are fused at the factory with thermal parameters and with some units disabled; the only difference is that here firmware is involved.
NV seem to be turning friendlier towards nouveau, so I'd give them the benefit of the doubt. If they wanted to be evil, they would've just required signed firmware for the card to function at all. The fact that they're bothering to have non-secure modes and are only locking out very specific features suggests they're actively trying to play nicely with open source software.
Fuck That Shit! (Score:2, Insightful)
That's the god damn fucking last straw. All these years I thought Nividia was slowly being dragged into the open by Nouveau. Digging their heals in but still an inexorable movement in the direction of the inevitable. But jesus fucking christ this move is such bullshit, 2 steps forward and 5 steps back. No more nvidia for me. They've just made AMD the only choice for graphics cards.
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Re:Fuck That Shit! (Score:5, Funny)
- To tighten their control.on the hardware you paid good money for.
- To fight terrorism, childporn, illegal goods.
Re:Fuck That Shit! (Score:4, Insightful)
So that they can pretend to sell hardware while maintaining permanent control of it?
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How does ensuring that certain FIRMWARE stays on the card do that, unless they are planning some sort of massive malware conspiracy?
This argument about drivers I could understand to an extent. But firmware?
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Why not Intel? The latest Intel lines are pretty good (I game a lot on one of those), and have their drivers in the upstream linux kernel.
AMD is simply so awful in terms of drivers, that it doesn't really matter if the hardware is slightly better.
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What you may be thinking of are the closed source drivers for Linux: Nvidia's closed Linux driver is bet
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The 3d stuff does work, just not for the latest cards.
Are you sure? You may need a more up-to-date kernel than your favorite distro provides to support the latest cards, but I certainly had the impression that AMD is actively pushing code into the mainstream kernel. Southern Island and Sea Island chipsets are both supported in 3.16 (and possibly earlier).
3D performance on many ATI/AMD cards is actually better with the open source kernel drivers than with the proprietary drivers if you have a recent enough kernel, according to some reports I've heard.
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For older cards, the OSS driver might end up being better than crapalyst.
Actually, it's the newer cards that are reported to have better performance with the latest OSS drivers.
This is a pretty recent development, though. A little over a year ago, everything I'd heard was in line with what you're saying. But when I heard about all the improvements in the recent OSS drivers, I took a chance and bought a box with ATI, just a couple of months ago, and I must say that it's been absolutely smooth, effortless, and 100% hassle free. With a 3.12 kernel (now upgraded to 3.14). And no cat
As Linus said "Fuck you NVIDIA" (Score:3, Informative)
Surely it is impossible to have an opensource software if it needs a key to build it into a runnable program?
I mean you have the binary but you cannot recreate it from the source without that key to sign it with. The key is part of the source and you don't have it.
Installation Information (Score:2)
Surely it is impossible to have an opensource software if it needs a key to build it into a runnable program?
Of course you can under TiVo's interpretation of GPLv2, so long as the key is not an executable part of the program. The publisher can apply the signature key as part of linking the executable.
I mean you have the binary but you cannot recreate it from the source without that key to sign it with.
You're referring "Installation Information" in GPLv3. GPLv2 refers to something similar in "scripts to control compilation and installation", but it's not nearly as explicit as in GPLv3.
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Surely it is impossible to have an opensource software if it needs a key to build it into a runnable program?
I mean you have the binary but you cannot recreate it from the source without that key to sign it with. The key is part of the source and you don't have it.
This is pretty much the reason the GPLv3 was written, to take care of this loophole in other licenses. If there are other parts of the GPLv3 that people don't like, perhaps we can update it and make a nice GPLv4, but many people throw the baby out with the bathwater with their hatred of GPLv3. I think having the ability of signing the keys yourself is an important topic.
Well that's just it (Score:4, Interesting)
I've had it. I don't understand why they don't just release all of the specs of the cards. Why don't they give them away for free? Or provide a 3D-printable download at the very least. Fuck nVidia!
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I've had it. I don't understand why they don't just release all of the specs of the cards. Why don't they give them away for free?
This is actually a good question. As I understand it, the answer is that:
1) They don't want to reveal the intimate details of their architectures and/or drivers that they've invested in
2) They don't want to be sued for infringing patents (either by rival GPU companies or, more likely, by patent-trolls)
Or provide a 3D-printable download at the very least.
....what?
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Good points.
Fuck you, Nvidia (Score:1)
Torvalds was right.
Who makes the most FOSS friendls GFX HW? (Score:2)
With all this hassle nowadays - I remember the times when nVidia was the only company supporting Linux and was something like the darly child of the FOSS community - which company actually *is* the most FOSS friendly today? Intel? AMD/ATI? Some other company?
Educated opinions on this needed.
Gluglug (Score:2)
It totally depends what you want (Score:3)
Intel has I believe all their Linux drivers fully open sourced. However, they're not really fast compared to AMD or NVidia. AMD has two driver versions, their closed source catalyst driver and the open source one. The catalyst driver is much faster, energy efficient and can do more tricks than the open source one. NVidia is sort-of supporting Nouveau and has their own binary driver as well. The "sort of supporting" is much limited compared to the amount of AMD is pouring in the open source version of their
Nvidia is shooting themselves in the foot (Score:1)
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"The FOSS community" is tiny. The vast majority of the time Linux is selected for practical or pragmatice reasons. Most people using Linux aren't using it for ideological reasons. There aren't enough people prepared to boycott NVIDIA over this to make a difference. Also, it's firmware that needs to be signed, not drivers.
Not a big deal... (Score:5, Informative)
Andy Ritger at Nvidia is already in talks with Ben Skeggs and Martin Peres with Nouveau. They're are going to hash out the details at XDC2014 [x.org]. The impact for Nouveau is in the packaging and distribution parts of the cycle, not development. Also, it was Nvidia who reached out to Nouveau, not the other way around. Nvidia has their reasons for doing this, but it's not an anti FOSS thing. It's more likely one of the more sane reasons posted above.
So everyone just relax their sphincters a bit....
Read Only Memory (Score:2)
Once upon a time, there was this stuff called "Read Only Memory". Not EPROM or EEPROM, but ROM. Once it was created you couldn't change the contents of it.
If I was worried that scammers were going to take a board that I was selling as a Whizzo rather than a Whizzo Plus because it didn't meet Whizzo Plus specs, and flash it as a Whizzo Plus anyway to rip off customers, I'd put "Hi there I'm Whizzo serial number 987654321 born 2014-09-24-18:58:56 GMT at the Utopia Planitia assembly line, signed <digital
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They only need a very small amount of actual unchangeable memory. Do it like Microsoft did on the XBOX 360 and have fusible links on-die on the GPU, when the card is manufactured, the fusible links are blown to store the ID of which GPU it is in a way that cant later be altered.
Such things should be forbidden (Score:2)
After all its artificially limiting what you can do with the hardware. Plus it'll mean you'll have to run closed source firmware from the manufacturer on the device, which means that it'll probably contain malware. Why else would you distribute software in object code only? (No, competitors probably have reverse engineered it years ago.)
Not the same, but a subset (Score:2)
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That is not how Nvidia's or ANY video card firmware works because they need to be active at the moment of power on, before there is even an OS loaded. VBIOS is stored on the card, not copied to VRAM.
What you say is absolutely true yet grossly misleading and I suspect you know it. Yes, if you boot a machine with no HDD, no OS, no drivers the computer will display something to say "Hey, I have no boot disk" which is obviously built in. To get 2D/3D/video acceleration though you typically need to load a firmware module first, then you can start programming it through the API. As I understand it based on reading about AMD's open drivers which still depend on closed source hardware their opinion it the firm
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You are right, they are not the same thing. However, some pieces of hardware have no firmware instanlled and require the driver to upload it on boot. I have no idea if that's how nvidia cards work, but I know that years ago when I was using hauppauge analog tv capture cards, this was exactly the case. Instead of flashing the firmware to the card, it just gets loaded every time you reboot. In these cases, people passionate about open source are probably going to want to use open source firmware to go with th
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the companies have licenses, which prohibit distribution of the fireware, except for some ways they thought of (like download of the official windows driver). So distributing the fireware itself is illegal and you get tools like the bcm-firmware-cutter, which extracts the firmware from the windows driver binaries. This is legal, as long as the user downloads the firmware (so the tool maintainer does not distribute anything from the company).
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The only people who are going to get butt-hurt over this are a tiny fraction of Linux users who represent a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of the GPU market.
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Most of people running gaming GPUs on linux are probably gaming.
That means nvidia's own closed source drivers. Open source drivers are utterly crippled when it comes to gaming, and it would take a huge masochist to use them.
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Working with a complex scene in Blender with a Intel "graphics" is about as fun as rubbing sandpaper in your eye.
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I imagine working on it with open source nvidia drivers is not going to be much better, just in a different way. One is painfully slow, other is less slow but painfully crashy.
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Yep, unless you've got one of a quite small list of well-supported cards. Those are not so powerful these days, but if you've got one then you're still worlds better off than with an Intel.
I've tried... two ATI (back then) cards, one I never got to work, and the other found all sorts of interesting ways to crash and malfunction. Have to admit I haven't tried again since - the devil you know and all that.
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Why not just use closed source drivers?
About the only reason I can see not to is putting ideology ahead of pragmatic solution in a problem where being pragmatic will have little to no impact on ideological struggle for open source. Nvidia won't care either way and won't open source its drivers even if every single linux user were to ask for it. Too small of an audience.
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That's the question I ask myself, and I don't have a satisfactory answer. I use the proprietary drivers.
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Or just want the drivers to work, which might require some patching. okay, the nvidia driver works ootb in most cases, but in the past there were vmware-driver patches for each new kernel.
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Keep dreaming. Linux on the desktop yet? :)
At the rate Microsoft is going in their mad race to piss off & alienate just about everyone with a high-end workstation (by pushing Windows towards dumbed-down touch-based interfaces), that goal is actually starting to look attainable. Five years from now, one of two things will likely happen:
* Microsoft will have finally pissed off & alienated enough users for some critical mass of high end desktop/workstation power users to decide Windows is annoying them more than making their lives easier, and v
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Not so funny anymore.
http://www.dpreview.com/articl... [dpreview.com]
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Re:Not really new practice for Linux. (Score:5, Funny)
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Yeah, but first sale doctrine says that when you buy something: ITS YOURS! You can do whatever you want with it. Use the brand new car you bought as a boat or airplane? Sure, whatever floats your boat. But a lot of technology companies want to screw you over and say "no, we don't want you doing that with our stuff". A lot of them will make a standard product, then sell it as tiered products by crippling functionality. Enough. AMD has good functionality out of the box with open drivers. The kernel
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If it's flashable, it is hackable, right?
Perhaps the part that verifies the signature isn't flashable. Consider the Wii video game console's boot process. When the Wii is turned on, the first stage bootloader in mask ROM on the I/O processor ("boot0") loads the second stage ("boot1") from NAND flash and verifies its hash against a hardcoded hash stored in one-time-programmable (OTP) memory on the I/O processor. System updates cannot change boot1. Then boot1 loads the third stage ("boot2") from NAND flash and checks its RSA signature by comparing t
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Shield is an ARM tablet that's shaped like a controller. Being able to stream a game from your GPU is just one of its functionalities.
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It depends.
If the blob is only needed to control the thermal logic on the chips, then the vast majority of the open code that's required (interfacing with the buses, talking to the chips, converting and uploading primitives and textures to RAM etc.) is still under the control of the OS.
I see it as akin to the wireless devices where the region-specific allowed frequencies are used. The operation of the chip - it's loading order, it's interaction and security of RAM, it's performance, it being under the cont