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Oh man, this just unlocked a cool memory - I was in my computer graphics course in college and was trying to write a shader that would generate a wood-grain tex
by daguava 4y ago
Oh man, this just unlocked a cool memory - I was in my computer graphics course in college and was trying to write a shader that would generate a wood-grain texture.
I messed something up about it, and must have been pulling from the wrong graphics memory, and noticed That the brown wood didn't have a swirl pattern but had what looked like text in it?
After staring a bit closer, I noticed it was the text that was written to the console in visual studio, I had somehow brought that graphics buffer in to use as my "swirl pattern". I had to sit back and think a bit about how data on your computer isn't always as safe as you think sometimes after that...
- rightbyte 4y agoHeh nice story. I wonder if you can sidetrack sandboxes like that.
- ticviking 4y agoGPU security is probably it’s own fascinating niche of exploits.
- 000001010011100 4y agoIf I recall correctly this is exactly how the 3DS was hacked... Nintendo locked down the os userspace to not have access to certain parts of memory... the GPU however had DMA and access to all ram... there is a Chaos Communications Congress talk about it. Interesting stuff.
- andrepd 4y agoThe CCC talks about console hacking are always tons of fun.
- 000001010011100 4y agoMy favourite too. I wish I had the brain space and the time :(
- eloisius 4y agoAs recently as 2012 I remember my MacBook Pro having rendering glitches where a webpage I had been looking at hours before would be displayed in the frozen window of another app, with scan lines or sometimes inverted.
- CapsAdmin 4y agoI think that's just what happens if you read memory that hasn't been zeroed on the gpu. There's no out of bounds checks or anything on GPU memory. (probably/hopefully there is on the web) I've seen many bits of cahced browser viewport textures when writing shaders and making mistakes. I've been wanting to create something procedurally from it somehow ever since I encountered it.