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I remember Nvidia getting hacked pretty bad a few years ago. IIRC, the hackers threatened to release everything they had unless they open sourced their drivers.

I remember Nvidia getting hacked pretty bad a few years ago. IIRC, the hackers threatened to release everything they had unless they open sourced their drivers. Maybe they got what they wanted. [0] https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/nvidia-hackers-allegedly-attempting-to-blackmail-company-into-open-sourcing-gpu-drivers https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/nvidia-hackers-allegedly-...

nicce 2y ago
Kernel modules are not user-space drivers which are still proprietary.
- porphyra 2y ago
  Much of the black magic has been moved from the drivers to the firmware anyway.
- bradyriddle 2y ago
  Ooops. Missed that part. Re-reading that story is kind of wild. I don't know how valuable what they allegedly got would be (silicon, graphics and chipset files) but the hackers accused Nvidia of 'hacking back' and encrypting their data. Reminds me of a story I heard about Nvidia hiring a private military to guard their cards after entire shipments started getting 'lost' somewhere in asia.
  - spookie 2y ago
    Wait what? That PMC story got me. Where can I find more info on that lmao?
    - bradyriddle 2y ago
      I'd heard the story first hand from a guy in san jose. Never looked it up until now. This is the closest thing I could find to it. In which case it sounds like it's been debunked. [0] https://www.pcgamer.com/no-half-a-million-geforce-rtx-30-series-gpus-were-not-lost-in-shipment-and-now-found/ https://www.pcgamer.com/no-half-a-million-geforce-rtx-30-ser... [1] https://www.geeknetic.es/Noticia/20794/Encuentran-en-Corea-500000-GPUs-RTX-30-de-NVIDIA-que-habian-sido-perdidas.html https://www.geeknetic.es/Noticia/20794/Encuentran-en-Corea-5...
dralley 2y ago
I doubt it. It's probably a matter of constantly being prodded by their industry partners (i.e. Red Hat), constantly being shamed by the community, and reducing the amount of maintenance they need to do to keep their driver stack updated and working on new kernels. The meat of the drivers is still proprietary, this just allows them to be loaded without a proprietary kernel module.
- p_l 2y ago
  I suspect it's mainly the reduced maintenance and reduction of workload needed to support, especially with more platforms coming to be supported (not so long ago there was no ARM64 nvidia support, now they are shipping their own ARM64 servers!) What really changed the situation is that Turing architecture GPUs bring new, more powerful management CPU, which has enough capacity to essentially run the OS-agnostic parts of driver that used to be provided as blob on linux.
  - knotimpressed 2y ago
    Am I correct in reading that as Turing architecture cards include a small CPU on the GPU board, running parts of the driver/other code?
    - p_l 2y ago
      In Turing microarchitecture, nVidia replaced their old "falcon" cpu with NV-RISCV RV64 chip, running various internal tasks. "Open Drivers" from nVidia include different firmware that utilizes the new-found performance.
      - matheusmoreira 2y ago
        How well isolated is this secondary computer? Do we have reason to fear the proprietary software running on it?
        p_l 2y ago
justinclift 2y ago
For Nvidia, the most likely reason they've strongly avoided Open Sourcing their drivers isn't anything like that. It's simply a function of their history. They used to have high priced professional level graphics cards ("Nvidia Quadro") using exactly the same chips as their consumer graphics cards. The BIOS of the cards was different, enabling different features. So people wanting those features cheaply would buy the consumer graphics cards and flash the matching Quadro BIOS to them. Worked perfectly fine. Nvidia naturally wasn't happy about those "lost sales", so began a game of whack-a-mole to stop BIOS flashing from working. They did stuff like adding resistors to the boards to tell the card whether it was a Geforce or Quadro card, and when that was promptly reverse engineered they started getting creative in other ways. Meanwhile, they couldn't really Open Source their drivers because then people could see what the "Geforce vs Quadro" software checks were. That would open up software countermeasures being developed. --- In the most recent few years the professional cards and gaming cards now use different chips. So the BIOS tricks are no longer relevant. Which means Nvidia can "safely" Open Source their drivers now, and they've begun doing so. -- Note that this is a copy of my comment from several months ago, as it's just as relevant now as it was then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38418278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38418278
- 1oooqooq 2y ago
  interesting timing to recall that story. now the same trick is used for h100 vs whatever the throttled-for-embargo-wink-wink Chinese version is called. but those companies are really adverse to open sourcing because they can't be sure they own all the code. it's decades of copy pasting reference implementations after all
  - rfoo 2y ago
    > now the same trick is used for h100 vs whatever the throttled-for-embargo-wink-wink Chinese version No. H20 is a different chip designed to be less compute-dense (by having different combinations of SM/L2$/HBM controller). It is not a throttled chip. A800 and H800 are A100/H100 with some area of the chip physically blown up and reconfigured. They are also not simply throttled.
nicman23 2y ago
they did release it. a magic drive i have seen, but totally do not own, has it

nicce 2y ago

Kernel modules are not user-space drivers which are still proprietary.

porphyra 2y ago
Much of the black magic has been moved from the drivers to the firmware anyway.
bradyriddle 2y ago
Ooops. Missed that part. Re-reading that story is kind of wild. I don't know how valuable what they allegedly got would be (silicon, graphics and chipset files) but the hackers accused Nvidia of 'hacking back' and encrypting their data. Reminds me of a story I heard about Nvidia hiring a private military to guard their cards after entire shipments started getting 'lost' somewhere in asia.
- spookie 2y ago
  Wait what? That PMC story got me. Where can I find more info on that lmao?
  - bradyriddle 2y ago
    I'd heard the story first hand from a guy in san jose. Never looked it up until now. This is the closest thing I could find to it. In which case it sounds like it's been debunked. [0] https://www.pcgamer.com/no-half-a-million-geforce-rtx-30-series-gpus-were-not-lost-in-shipment-and-now-found/ https://www.pcgamer.com/no-half-a-million-geforce-rtx-30-ser... [1] https://www.geeknetic.es/Noticia/20794/Encuentran-en-Corea-500000-GPUs-RTX-30-de-NVIDIA-que-habian-sido-perdidas.html https://www.geeknetic.es/Noticia/20794/Encuentran-en-Corea-5...

dralley 2y ago

I doubt it. It's probably a matter of constantly being prodded by their industry partners (i.e. Red Hat), constantly being shamed by the community, and reducing the amount of maintenance they need to do to keep their driver stack updated and working on new kernels. The meat of the drivers is still proprietary, this just allows them to be loaded without a proprietary kernel module.

p_l 2y ago
I suspect it's mainly the reduced maintenance and reduction of workload needed to support, especially with more platforms coming to be supported (not so long ago there was no ARM64 nvidia support, now they are shipping their own ARM64 servers!) What really changed the situation is that Turing architecture GPUs bring new, more powerful management CPU, which has enough capacity to essentially run the OS-agnostic parts of driver that used to be provided as blob on linux.
- knotimpressed 2y ago
  Am I correct in reading that as Turing architecture cards include a small CPU on the GPU board, running parts of the driver/other code?
  - p_l 2y ago
    In Turing microarchitecture, nVidia replaced their old "falcon" cpu with NV-RISCV RV64 chip, running various internal tasks. "Open Drivers" from nVidia include different firmware that utilizes the new-found performance.
    - matheusmoreira 2y ago
      How well isolated is this secondary computer? Do we have reason to fear the proprietary software running on it?
      - p_l 2y ago

justinclift 2y ago

For Nvidia, the most likely reason they've strongly avoided Open Sourcing their drivers isn't anything like that. It's simply a function of their history. They used to have high priced professional level graphics cards ("Nvidia Quadro") using exactly the same chips as their consumer graphics cards. The BIOS of the cards was different, enabling different features. So people wanting those features cheaply would buy the consumer graphics cards and flash the matching Quadro BIOS to them. Worked perfectly fine. Nvidia naturally wasn't happy about those "lost sales", so began a game of whack-a-mole to stop BIOS flashing from working. They did stuff like adding resistors to the boards to tell the card whether it was a Geforce or Quadro card, and when that was promptly reverse engineered they started getting creative in other ways. Meanwhile, they couldn't really Open Source their drivers because then people could see what the "Geforce vs Quadro" software checks were. That would open up software countermeasures being developed. --- In the most recent few years the professional cards and gaming cards now use different chips. So the BIOS tricks are no longer relevant. Which means Nvidia can "safely" Open Source their drivers now, and they've begun doing so. -- Note that this is a copy of my comment from several months ago, as it's just as relevant now as it was then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38418278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38418278

1oooqooq 2y ago
interesting timing to recall that story. now the same trick is used for h100 vs whatever the throttled-for-embargo-wink-wink Chinese version is called. but those companies are really adverse to open sourcing because they can't be sure they own all the code. it's decades of copy pasting reference implementations after all
- rfoo 2y ago
  > now the same trick is used for h100 vs whatever the throttled-for-embargo-wink-wink Chinese version No. H20 is a different chip designed to be less compute-dense (by having different combinations of SM/L2$/HBM controller). It is not a throttled chip. A800 and H800 are A100/H100 with some area of the chip physically blown up and reconfigured. They are also not simply throttled.

nicman23 2y ago

they did release it. a magic drive i have seen, but totally do not own, has it