To those wondering what salawat is talking about: a while back Nvidia started signing the firmware that loads onto the auxiliary processors on their GPUs. Nouve

To those wondering what salawat is talking about: a while back Nvidia started signing the firmware that loads onto the auxiliary processors on their GPUs. Nouveau asked Nvidia for a minimal signed blob they could legally redistribute and load but was basically ghosted by Nvidia. Without that blob they can only drive the GPU at minimum power, which is often worse than Intel integrated graphics. The bit about DMCA 1201 is mostly hypothetical. i.e. Nvidia's code signing looks like a DRM scheme if you squint. If Nvidia really wanted to, they could argue that, say, cracking the code signing is illegal no matter what you do with it. My gut feeling is that the courts probably wouldn't be too keen on Nvidia suing over this in the case of, say, someone writing their own power management firmware and using an exploit to load it onto a GPU. DMCA 1201 is supposed to prevent you from copying other people's work, not writing your own. All of this is a moot point because Nvidia more recently released an "open source driver" that loads a single unified firmware blob. This has allowed building a new driver called NVK, which aside from having to load said blob is FOSS, and actually usable for Nvidia GPUs.