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.
It’s not so much destruction as it’s unnecessary anymore IMO. They don’t leave much performance on the table with dynamic clocking / voltages. It’s a more efficient usage of silicon ultimately.
I miss getting “free” power by knowing how to overclock, but I’m also kinda over it. I cut my teeth on a K6-2 with jumpers to set voltage/multiplier, so I’m kinda glad to have parts do 95% of their max speed right out of the box now. It was fun while it lasted.
I mean on AMDs side, their overclocking tools are actually in the driver install itself, Its just that a far majority of people use Nvidia. (At least for windows)
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 open source driver code is 100% equals the nvidia one, literally copy pasted, it would not work because it need to be signed by nvidia to do so.
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.
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.
Hell yeah! I think the public should have the right to inspect any software at any time. If you want it to go into my computer I think I should know if your sloppy ass spaghetti code is going to open me up to security vulnerabilities.
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