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Well, not quite. The charitable way to put it is that they are requiring signed firmware in hardware, in order to help stem fraud by 3rd party resellers (where some card model X is sold to naïve buyers as a more desirable model Y, with a hacked firmware to match) and project noveau is obviously impacted.



Problem is that Nvidia did much more than just signing firmware:

* Separated firmware that needed for basic and fully functional driver and given Nouveau only bits they wanted.

* Obfuscated and hidden firmware files within the driver binaries so they harder to extract.

* Changed loading process so GPU read it via DMA to make reverse engineering of firmware loading harder.

It's pretty clear that all of that was exclusively done to harm Nouveau.




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