NVIDIA's GeForce GPU BIOS Signature Lock Finally Defeated By New Modding Tools
The latter problem made everyone involved look bad, including NVIDIA, so its solution to this issue was to implement signature enforcement on the firmware of its graphics cards starting with the Maxwell 2-based GeForce 900 series. This actually worked pretty well to lock down the Green Team's graphics cards; while it didn't completely resolve the counterfeiting problem, it eliminated the path of least resistance and the overwhelming majority of fake GPUs vanished.
The unfortunate part is that NVIDIA's action also had two other major consequences for enthusiasts. For one, it demolished the ability of hard-core overclockers to modify the firmware on their GeForce graphics cards. This is important because high-end overclocking requires significant modifications to the power delivery and thermal management of the GPU, all of which is controlled ultimately by the firmware.
The other problem it created was the practical cessation of open-source GeForce driver support in Linux. NVIDIA provides its own GeForce driver for Linux that works rather well, as you'd imagine. The problem, for open-source fanatics, is that NVIDIA's official driver is closed-source, or "proprietary." There is an open-source driver known as Nouveau, but thanks to the encryption of NVIDIA's firmware, anything beyond the GeForce 700 series (dating back to 2013) is poorly-supported.
Now, some enterprising modders have finally made the impossible a reality. Using new tools known as OMGVflash and NVFlashk, it has just become possible to "flash almost any video BIOS onto almost any NVIDIA GeForce graphics card." This not only bypasses signature checks but also vendor and device checks, so you can cross-flash firmware from a different company's graphics card entirely.
That's a quote from TechPowerUp, by the way, which besides being one of our fellow tech blogs, is also a site that hosts not only the tool downloads but also an archive of video BIOS files for folks to cross-flash. You'll probably want to stick to that method, too, unless you're rocking an older generation Turing or Pascal card, because only cross-flashing is supported on the newer Ampere and Ada Lovelace architectures for now. As far as Linux goes, there's been no word yet from the Nouveau creators as to whether this new development will allow the open-source driver to support newer GPUs, but we can only hope.
