I had this thought cross my mind when thinking back about the latest RTX 3060 Driver limited Etherium mining…
From what i have understood, they plan to release the card with a driver that detect the type of memory access caused by ETH mining, and then do something to limit it.
In order to avoid bypass, they made the card, the driver, and the bios Hand-check (secure boot ?)
So … does that mean no linux driver ?
The official driver are almost never used because of how they are installed, so most of the time you have either badly optimized opensource driver, or reworked close source nvidia driver and you disable secure-boot because it’s a pain to enable.
If what i understood was right, both of those option won’t work with the 3060 (and maybe other card afterward ?) and you will be stuck with the official, binary blob, maybe spying on you , driver and will have to enable secure boot back.
I am all for secure boot, but very much not for close sourced driver.
Did i miss something ? did i jump to conclusion to fast ?
I have my doubts Nvidia can force/require secure boot for Linux, there are far too many machines(desktop/notebook) from DIY building/bare-bone systems and some OEM hardware you’re stuck disabling secure boot when running non-Windows/multi-booting other OSes. If I recall there were some 8th gen Intel notebooks you had to disable secure boot in order to run certain Linux distros or Grub/any non-Windows bootloader would stall.
Have no idea how they’re going to handle RTX 3060 drivers on Linux, closed source drivers are going to have plenty of low-level access to parts of the card that “opensource” drivers lack–if I recall the “opensource” driver is still stuck in 10/16-series level of performance as certain RTX specific stuff is still tied to the closed source driver. From personal experience with an RTX 20-series card, the performance with the opensource driver is on par with a 1070Ti/1080.
Even the distro packages just use the binary blob at their base, the only difference is the install method.
In other words: from a driver perspective it makes no difference whether you use the download from nvidia or the distro package. The advantage the distro packages have is better integration with the distro itself, it doesn’t change the driver.
Whether it will work on Linux or not (and can even detect ETH-Mining on Linux for that matter) remains to be seen and noone can answer that until they hit the market.
If I am not wrong, the way distro deploy the driver break secure boot.
That’s what I meant.
If they release cards that refuse to work without official driver on a support platform, i fear the day of RTX on linux are over, and like so many other features (3d vision) linux will be lock behind quadro…
Not even all that well either, apparently it will do $7 a day still and with the price continuing to rise that will be even more worth it.
So now gamers won’t get a deal when these are eventually not worth mining on and sold cheap, and their silicon supplies are divided between RTX cards across the entire line and the CMP HX mining cards that cant but used for anything neededng outputs.
But some how this will increase supply? nVidia must have the exotic crack to come up with that idea.
And at the same time putting the last nail in the coffin for Nouveau. Guarantee Nouveau will never work for the 3060. It already stopped working for Turing, where Ubuntu ISOs have to explicitly have a nomodeset GRUB option because Nouveau is that broken.
Crypo isn’t something i care about, nor is how available that lock would make stuff, because if every other new card have those weird card-driver-bios hand-check, i might never be able to buy nvidia anyway…
This is pure nvidia marketing to look like they’re “doing the right thing by gamers” when in reality, they’ve further segmented the market to sell mining specific cards with less hardware on them (likely no display out, etc.) for same/more money. Every single one of those mining cards could have been a fully functional gaming card; one that would still be on the market, come the inevitable mining crash - instead they’ll be toxic e-waste.
Those mining cards will be useless to gamers on the secondhand market. Gamers will not be able to help pay off their shiny new card (that does include display output) by mining on the side, either (assuming they do actually follow through and cripple mining properly on them). The last 3 of my cards paid for themselves and their replacements via mining on the side for a few weeks.
“fuck miners!” I hear, and yeah I get it, but this isn’t the solution at all. this is more a case of fucking gamers over while trying to look like you’re on their side for the less informed or those who don’t actually know or think about what is going on with regards to the chip supply side.
We don’t actually know that. Potentially they could be chips that were not suited for gaming due to defective areas on the die or similar.
Not saying they are, but it certainly is a possibility.
I mean … yeaa. But not the point of this topic.
The fact that this new segments i will never buy from exists is not cool, but what I care about is how the lockdown on rtx linked to that will affect us.
For now it feel like no-one have any intel on this.
I don’t like to do this because he is surely flooded with ping, but @wendell did you manage to get one ? Can you tell me i am overthinking it and they won’t be any driver issue on linux ?
Gamers Nixus (edit: meant Nexus but considering the Linux thing this works haha) have them and also do this sort of testing, especially if it is something that can get a headline and encourage some potential industry change, they like to get in the face of the companies forcefully.
I know they don’t do Linux but this being easy enough to test they might give it a go for the sake of the video to be made of it. Maybe tweet at Steve, he has a card on hand and could give an answer if they do it pretty quickly.
Done and done, though I don’t really use Twitter either so I will probably forget I asked or to check if this goes anywhere. Don’t be afraid to poke me in a few days time.
, driver and will have to enable secure boot back.