Zagitta

I wouldn't hold my breath for 50 series, hopper & blackwell has a different boot architecture with more security layers

These firmwares are already fully encrypted but nvidia has been publishing encrypted debug images that turns out could be decrypted with one of their public test keys. And those debug firmwares turned out to be close enough to the production ones that they could be used to construct exploits from.

In this case it's a DMA buffer overflow that writes to the stack which in turn can be exploited with Return Oriented Programming. So no unsigned code is ever executed but we still have code execution control.

Maybe they got hold of the vbios for those higher vram versions similar to the 48gb 4090s?

Hopper and blackwell have a very different security chain so those are out of scope for this approach at least.

But I would suspect China has figured something out given the reports of them buying 5090s in droves and seemingly modifying them.

If they are forked from my repo whatever driver version they pin doesn't matter, the pin is just clanker stuff really. What it's used for is just extracting the right booter firmware and loading it, but the whole booter part is reset before handing over to nvidia driver so the versions dont have to match at all.

Blackwell and hopper have a whole new boot process so those are unlikely to fall over anytime soon from what I've seen.

If you can't wait for 4090 someone has a fork with a seemingly working unlock :D

Yeah I hate the patched drivers too, I have a CMP170 as well I want to see if I can find a way to get fully working the same way without or minimal driver patching.

4000s is WIP, forks has already unlocked it but I'm doing some refactoring to better support different families and after that I'll port it over :-)

It's quite nuanced. In a nutshell the unlock just flips the 2 bits that halves how often the core can issue the specific instructions Nvidia locks to full rate on the professional and datacenter cards.

Obviously doing more compute requires more power but what it does is shift the card down on the frequency curve to keep the wattage in check. So you're right that at stock power limits it hits a cap where the full issuing rate isn't reached but it depends heavily on the exact workload how much juice is left.

The frequency curve also takes heat into account so in general you end up with a nice perf boost for a slightly hotter card.

I've been running this on my 2 3090s for a month now with no issues but they are also water cooled :-)

It's also useful for prefill in inference, VLLM sees up to 30% boost depending on the exact kernels and prefill size

Hey this is my work, although the exploits etc aren't my ideas by any means. This is just a way to wrap the whole thing up in a much less annoying package than having to patch the nvidia driver. I originally got inspired by the CMP90/50 windows unlocks that run as standalone UEFI modules that chainloads into the OS.

Happy to answer questions!

It's the FP/BF16 FMA to FP32 instructions.

And also it does work on most 3000 series cards as they all run the same GA102 booter that's vulnerable :-) There are some reports of cards with weird vbios layouts having issues but i'll try to get that fixed

Musk constantly LIES, a tweet from him means literally nothing

So now we're suddenly talking about living standards and not environmental regulation?

Your first 3 countries are also incredibly poor comparisons for living standards as they have horrendous work/life balance.