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Isn't the flash chip on nvidia boards a generic thing that someone could buy themself, flash using existing eeprom writing gear, then solder onto the board? Al
by justinclift 3y ago
Isn't the flash chip on nvidia boards a generic thing that someone could buy themself, flash using existing eeprom writing gear, then solder onto the board?
Also, as the chip and board here seems like an A100 reference design, using an A100 VBIOS image shouldn't fail any signature checks.
- formerly_proven 3y agoYes, but the public key and product ID for the verification is in the GPU, not the external flash.
- justinclift 3y agoAhhh. That sucks then. :/
- phire 3y agoProbably, but the A100 BIOS probably can detect it is running on something other than a A100 and bail. The lack of memory would be the most obvious difference. The A100 has 80GB, this has 8GB. And I really suspect Nvidia probably some way of explicitly locking a chip to a given product ID, like efuses that the BIOS firmware can check on boot.
- ilyt 3y agoYou can just buy same chip if someone somehow decided to check random flash chip vendor. More sensible way to stopping that would be writing eeprom with encrypted key burned into the GPU itself but I doubt NVIDIA bothered, money loss for few people willing enough to take their GPU apart to replace a chip is insignificiant.