Nvidia RTX Spark encrypted firmware slows inference speed to 35% on Linux

Wtf. Are we actually seeing a push towards being 100percent dependent on the cloud?

Sovereign AI has never been more important.

Controlling AI is so much more powerful and impactful than controlling search or social algorithms.

Centralized AI a 10x on social control over everything we have seen before, and there is no way that a free and open society survives contact with centralised, high capability AI if the system is manipulated towards guiding outcomes. It’s essentially mind control, as people will offload an even greater share of their cognition to AI than they do with search and social.

Build and maintain sovereign AI while you still can.

Nvidia doing what Nvidia has always done; proprietary closed drivers. Weird choice to cryptographically protect the power settings. Key problem is that we've allowed a company that's always been this way to form a monopoly. Other brands exist, perhaps it is now worth the effort to migrate and rebuild elsewhere.

> A hands-on look at dual-booting Linux on the Nvidia RTX Spark laptop, the GPU clock throttling bug found, and why WSL still wins.

Man it really is exhausting to read a title that sparks my interest, just to be greeted with the most basic Claude-isms in the subheading.

>Oddly, the direction of the problem flips depending on power source. Unplugged, Linux hit around 61 to 67 tokens per second on LM Studio, comparable to Windows. Plugged in, that same test dropped to about 15 tokens per second.

Absolutely hilarious.

This is just incompetence. No reason Nvidia with its TRILLIONS of market cap couldn't of tested and fixed this on Linux before shipping.

Or a day one patch.

I have no doubt that'll it'll work right eventually. Long after RTX Spark laptops flop and can be purchased for half off.

Last night I pulled out my 5070TI laptop and installed CachyOS. I was running various models within about 20 minutes.

That 12GB of VRAM is a hard limitation, Unsloth can't split jobs between vram and system memory.

Nvidia was already a bad choice for Linux because of closed drivers.

The article is about the RTX Spark, not the DGX Spark. The title should be changed.

Why does the title say DGX spark when the link is the RTX Spark laptop?

Those are very different things as far as I understand, and the whole "doesn't work well with linux" really only makes sense on the RTX Spark laptop I think? Isn't the DGX spark linux by default?

It should be possible to reverse engineer this, if it works on windows?

> The laptops also support unified memory configurations up to 128GB, shared between CPU and GPU, which is unusual for a laptop and central to why they’re being marketed at AI developers in the first place.

This isn't rare on laptops, pretty default on AMD with iGPU

I remain puzzled why anyone would want to do inference on a laptop if they have a home internet connection and a phone.

If you really want to do DIY inference, plug it in at home and set up tailscale so you can access it on the go.

No huge battery drain or toasty hot laptop required. Lower cost laptop. Lighter laptop. Longer battery life laptop. Win win win win.

Fortunately that's just a matter of weeks until someone revengs and publishes the fix... even if we need to wait a while for a proper upstreamed solution.

I wonder if you could port the GB10's drivers over? They're extremely similar and the GPU itself identifies all the same specs.[1]

Also very curious if the NPU is visible in Linux, too.

https://www.xda-developers.com/nvidia-rtx-spark-laptops-same...

We have antitrust laws on the books. They have barely been enforced since Reagan. But that good change if there was political will. How is Nvidia not a monopoly?

> the GPU gets locked to roughly 780 MHz on Linux instead of the 2 GHz-plus it hits on Windows

This has been an issue on Linux since 2014, and the gtx980.

You will never stop me. As I and everyone like me, before and after me, have shown, time and time again. And by me, I mean nature. And by nature I mean math and logic unchangeable in any possible universe. You cannot give me a thing without me having it. If a thing exists, I can copy it, know it, and bring it's equivalent into existence. Nothing can be created that is not indelibly written into the the intricate cause and effect chain of history. A perfectly encrypted thing is indistinguishable from the noise of the cosmos, but if I want I thing, it shall soon emerge, free from any control from that noise, which is the weight of all that has happened, just as surely as I can count to a number.

If you want to prosper with the current of nature, provide a thing easily for mutual benefit. The more you try to block a thing, the sooner your demise into uselessness.

hm. nvidia is garbage on linux again. just as the prophecy foretold. we are safe from the singularity, for now.

So weird that everyone gives Microsoft a complete pass. They probably paid Nvidia to give them a head start so people would be forced into Windows and WSL for awhile.

I am starting to wonder whether CEOs everywhere ( but especially in US ) are simply unable to read the room. I shrugged off nvidia when they did it to gaming and mining ( it annoyed me, but ultimately there were options to deal with it ), but here it is touching a much wider populace with repercussion well beyond crypto and gaming.

Assume I'm naive on this matter, but why wouldn't Nvidia allow its own DGX OS to be a first party OS on these devices? Some sort of MS subsidy? Ecosystem-wise, wouldn't it make sense for Nvidia to keep pushing its own OS on all the devices containing its hardware?

Unrelated to this slowdown, I could imagine this sort of thing being the right application for things like Taalas, although I'm not quite sure whether it can actually offer what I imagine that it can (i.e. ability to make a cheap, physically small card that can run a large model).

A laptop can't run the latest big models, because memory is too expensive. This thing probably can't run models larger than Mistral Small 4. But it'd be a completely different thing to have a hardcoded Mistral Large 4, than a choice of tiny models.

This reason alone is why I rather stay on Strix Halo

Nvidia being the shittiest hardware vendor for GNU/Linux, as always.

Remember when Apple was slowing down iPhones, the outrage!

But with Nvidia people just expect they nerf all the features.

Have you tried lact to increase clock/power level? https://flathub.org/en/apps/io.github.ilya_zlobintsev.LACT

I do wonder how much it would cost to "clean room" engineer the firmware using AI.

2 months old laptop has power management issues on Linux. What a suprise!

Still miles ahead compared to Apple, where linux does not even boot on newer macs!

This one is allegedly/hopefully a bug but just waiting for it to become a revenue stream / paywall. Uh oh, you want to run locally your dangerous illegal foreign open models, not licensed by Nvidia? Can’t work with you paying for a special security feature unlock on your GPU.

Or maybe just not at all - shell out for OAI tokens and send us all your data - your privacy is very valuable to us and we will make sure to be the only ones to monetize it.

You could say, Nvidia is selling pickaxes and has no business gatekeeping what rocks you hit with it, but I guess it depends on their relationships with major mining companies, and ultimately what pays more.

As a DGX Spark user, this article title gave me conniptions.

But, on the other hand, having my DGX Spark stack at hand, I know the solution:

    /btw reverse engineer the Nvidia Platform Controllers and Framework component and build a Linux version

"AI views proprietary components as damage and routes around them."

Decompile time

just reverse engineer the firmware...

As always, nothing has changed, Nvidia is always shit in supporting Linux.

much ado about nothing, it'll probably come out in some time. Just microsoft trying to capture market/midnshare initially

Wtf is Nvidia doing?! I was considering buying one, but now?

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