YHK - yet another hacker news clone

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

143 points novaRom 3 hours ago 72 comments

rich_sasha 2 hours ago | parent

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.

hypfer 2 hours ago | parent

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?

novaRom 1 hour ago | parent

Good point, fixed, thanks.

schaefer 2 hours ago | parent

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

sampo 1 hour ago | parent

Looks like the site has fixed the title.

fxwin 2 hours ago | parent

> 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.

aa-jv 2 hours ago | parent

> sparks my interest

I see what you did there. ;)

teiferer 59 minutes ago | parent

Enumerating 3 things really ..sparks a comment nowadays? Doing that as a rhetorical device has been a thing for generations and of course LLMs mimic it because it is everywhere in their training data.

I just heard a quick J. Talarico speech at some country concert. In the 10 or so sentences he spoke, he had 3 or 4 instances of doing this "Claudism" enumeration. Are you saying Texas just elected Claude for Senate?

Maybe we should stop with such superficial judgements. It's the modern equivalent of not liking the speaker's tie. (Doesn't mean the speaker's speech is good, but it doesn't mean it's bad either.)

lemagedurage 38 minutes ago | parent

I think it's the combination of the profound writing style with the underwhelming substance that bothers people.

fxwin 30 minutes ago | parent

There are more Claude-isms in there than just rule of three (Hence -isms and not -ism), and while I'd generally agree that we generally shouldn't be superficial with our judgements, this particular heuristic has served me pretty well so far.

aa-jv 2 hours ago | parent

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."

u1hcw9nx 2 hours ago | parent

Do you know that 1 + 1 = 10 in binary?

aa-jv 1 hour ago | parent

I know that, because I read the article, but if all I'd read was the title, I'd not know that.

EDIT: I don't know why you changed your comment, but yes, it was obvious from reading the article that it was not actually about the DGX Spark.

K0balt 1 hour ago | parent

The attack on reverse engineering of games is a precursor to universal computing lockdown. When you need AI to keep up with programming, the entity controlling the AI controls what software is possible to create. It’s a bid for centralised control and thought censorship at a scale and depth much more ambitious than anything we have ever seen before.

Sovereign AI has never been more important.

aa-jv 21 minutes ago | parent

The ecosystem and commumnity around the DGX Spark platform is semi-sovereign AI, or at least its as close to it as we can find so far.

But yeah, we do need to make sure the REA cat stays out of the bag.

I, for one, welcome our reverse-engineer-anything overlords.

barrkel 2 hours ago | parent

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.

solyin 1 hour ago | parent

Not everyone grew up in a situation where home was a stable dependable place. Not everyone has a home to go to. If you have it with you, they can't mess with it or take it away from you when you're not there. If you grew up in a broken home, you would understand.

Gigachad 1 hour ago | parent

And those people are buying $10k laptops to run local AI?

jeroenhd 1 hour ago | parent

Those people won't be buying the Spark laptop, but asking "why anyone would want to do inference on a laptop" is broader than what the article covers.

Danox 1 hour ago | parent

The spark laptop in its present form is not very good, in fact, it’s disappointing.

pixelpoet 1 hour ago | parent

I have been saying this for years, and the answer hits a nerve that gets you downvoted into oblivion: people prefer the aesthetics of laptops, simple as that. They will absolutely go to the grave arguing that they need the mobility etc, then just leave it plugged in. They simply prefer how laptops look, and they absolutely hate it when someone dares say it.

monegator 1 hour ago | parent

I have a laptop for work. 95% of the time i'd prefer a tower or at least a mini PC with proper cooling, but that remaining 5% i have to be around with the laptop is enough. I don't like the idea of having to remember to sync the projects every time (especially while i'm in the middle of testing something new so it's not like i can just pull the latest commit or sync the latest good version of something)

dumberquestions 46 minutes ago | parent

If you do any travel whatsoever a laptop is usually not optional.

dlahoda 1 hour ago | parent

private memory.

unique local data and know how not shared with cloud.

close04 1 hour ago | parent

> why anyone would want to do inference on a laptop

Because reviewers tell them this is is a good use case, and people want to take advantage of the HW they buy [0]. Unfortunately those reviewers didn't take any extra step to validate anything beyond the default config, out of the box.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/reviews/2026/10/the-surface-laptop-u...

KeplerBoy 1 hour ago | parent

The RTX Spark is also sold in a mac mini form factor. That's pretty well suited for home inference.

alerighi 24 minutes ago | parent

Because maybe you don't want to send your private data to a company that could use it for whatever it wants?

K0balt 2 hours ago | parent

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.

InsidiousWombat 1 hour ago | parent

NVIDIA probably already figured out that local will be massive part and are preparing to do DRM for AI.

Pay up for license to unlock full capacity, pay up for license to use encrypted models from AI moguls, paid per billion tokens processed or just operations in GPU

hhh 1 hour ago | parent

There is already DRM for AI. check out nvidia’s docs around hosting proprietary models with encrypted weights

novaRom 1 hour ago | parent

Interestingly it is Microsoft who filed a patent for DRM-style locking of AI models to verified devices (published July 2026): https://patentlyze.com/patent/microsoft-drm-ai-models-explai...

skew-aberration 48 minutes ago | parent

So they can avoid the embarrassment when Copilot migrates to Qwen 4

sva_ 1 hour ago | parent

It wouldn't work on windows either, if that were the case. It sounds more like it hasn't been properly implemented yet

AlAjem 1 hour ago | parent

I don't see the case for DRM protected local models on either side.

The consumer has access to free and open models for local use.

The supplier has better control and wider market to serve running the models in data centers.

Only way I can see encrypted models being widespread is if they are bundled as part of a software package (OS/Browser/etc) and not sold as the product.

petu 1 hour ago | parent

There's good open weight models for now, labs could stop releasing them for whatever reason (assuming "good model" is a moving target).

ReptileMan 4 minutes ago | parent

Or buy Huawei ascend...

motbus3 1 hour ago | parent

Years ago I would think I was being paranoid to think they would patch hardware retroactively to make it slower so you need to pay more to use your own hardware. In 2026, I think this is what all car companies are doing after you pay the full car price. I don't see a reason why they wouldn't do it with so little competition

somat 43 minutes ago | parent

It smells like something IBM would do. Coming from small computers where you own it, I was flabbergasted to learn that IBM would ship additional processors and ram with their mainframes but you were not allowed to use them until you paid the additional license fee.

So it is something that has been done for a long time now. Still feels like unethical rent-seeking that should not be tolerated by the customer.

See Also: car companies that charge additional fees for hardware already on the car. Additional services, I sort of understand(remote start via cell network), but stuff like heated seats, that is just wrong.

duskdozer 52 minutes ago | parent

Yes? How is this at all surprising given....everything we've seen tech companies push for for years and years? People are fully embedding themselves and their workflows in the services of big, closed companies, and are going to be surprised when they finally feel able to clamp down? There has been warning sign after warning sign, but people are only increasing their dependence.

boltzmann64 49 minutes ago | parent

The reason why open source couldn't win search and social was because they need network effects which is not possible for open source maintainers.

AI is a software just like operating systems and executables where open source absolutely dominates the industry. Remember when the compiler engineers optimized the shit out of llama.cpp.

Right now the bottleneck for AI software is compute and data. Moore's law is give us compute, StackOverflow, arXiv (and it's children like bioRxiv), gutenberg and others (3lib, anna, internet.org) will give us data.

It's a waiting game. Open source always wins.

torben-friis 35 minutes ago | parent

>Right now the bottleneck for AI software is compute and data. Moore's law is give us compute, StackOverflow, arXiv (and it's children like bioRxiv), gutenberg and others (3lib, anna, internet.org) will give us data.

Tons of stuff happenning behind closed doors today though. No more stackoverflow for the next decade, that could create a problem if all new context only exists in chatgpt conversations only openAI has access to (or whoever).

Helmut10001 8 minutes ago | parent

Wait until the archives are compromised and millions of people's conversation and uploaded data are published. Such context was never before accessible in that scale, but it will become accessible soon, I am pretty sure.

GuB-42 47 minutes ago | parent

No, we are just seeing a push towards Nvidia wanting to make money.

Nothing stops you from giving Nvidia half a million for their latest and greatest AI GPUs, unless you are in China I guess, but China does very well despite the export control.

It is just classic market segmentation, the thing Nvidia and just about every company that can benefit from it has done for decades. Cloud providers are ready to pay a lot of money, consumers wanting local AI have a lower budget, and gamers even lower. But a low budget is greater than zero, and there is still money to be made on these markets. But they also don't want to compete against themselves, so they are going to find ways of crippling enterprise-class workloads on consumer hardware.

It used to be that they crippled high precision arithmetic on consumer hardware, because it was a differentiating factor, but AI doesn't care about high precision, so now, it is something else.

sidewndr46 20 minutes ago | parent

Given the history of prohibition in the past few centuries, it wouldn't surprise me if it is much easier to buy Nvidia products in China than in the US. The price is much higher most likely, but the actual transaction is likely easier.

hsuduebc2 15 minutes ago | parent

This is classical move from Nvidia. They are doing similiar bullshits on their GPUs for decades. I'm very much looking forwars for their competition to rise.

I do not understand this play. This means that only hyperscalers or someone who purchased a licence can use Spark?

sva_ 1 hour ago | parent

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

jcarrano 1 hour ago | parent

I though the same, reverse engineer with AI. Even run the AI on the laptop and have it reverse-engineer itself.

jleask 1 hour ago | parent

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.

NoidFonsense 36 minutes ago | parent

how are they going to sell you a subscripton to overclock your GPU otherwise?

jleask 17 minutes ago | parent

Sad but probably close to the truth. I'm old enough to remember when companies were able to make money without actively robbing their customers

jack_pp 4 minutes ago | parent

they could make money that way right now but they figured out they can make even more money by doing this. but jokes on them, people will figure it out, unlock / jailbreak and they just lose good will long term

dist-epoch 17 minutes ago | parent

It's not weird at all, they know people will buy these laptops, put linux on them and stash them in data-centers, so they are trying to prevent this.

afarah1 9 minutes ago | parent

New generations such as Blackwell have open source kernel modules, there is not even a proprietary option. I thought there was a move in this direction?

https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-transitions-fully-t...

TobiasJacob 1 hour ago | parent

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

meta-level 1 hour ago | parent

You're not supposed to want to buy one (https://www.osnews.com/story/146277/sam-altman-wants-to-take...)

totetsu 50 minutes ago | parent

I'm starting to feel empathy with those people who think bus lanes are coming form their freedom as part of some conspiracy to take away their cars.. I would like private enjoyment of my own RAM to use as I wish please.

DannyBee 32 minutes ago | parent

I think the backlash meme on that one (https://preview.redd.it/what-has-got-to-do-with-ram-v0-ry70i... and such) is hilarious.

They really got it right on multiple levels - for those who don't know, roller coaster tycoon was infamously written in 99% assembly and meticulously optimized by the developer to run effectively in 16 megabytes of ram.

dzonga 23 minutes ago | parent

ai labs need better stewards besides the carton / comic level villainy from sam altman and dario

impossiblefork 1 hour ago | parent

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.

RealityVoid 1 hour ago | parent

You probably won't be able to run a sota model on a single Talaas card. You probably need a set. It should theoretically be cheaper, faster, more power efficient than Nvidia at running that model. But then you are stuck with a chip that can run only that model. And I understand that context size will also be a problem.

impossiblefork 1 hour ago | parent

Yeah, that was why I felt that, while Taalas might not be the right thing in general, it could be really appealing in a laptop, that would otherwise not be able to run any big model at all.

I think I misunderstood what the technology could do a little bit, because I imagined these fixed matrix multiplies encoded into hardware as small-ish, as using routing space etc., not just fast.

I think what I really imagined was useful would be more easily achieved by having a big ROM with model weights connected to an ordinary GPU.

ChiliPie 1 hour ago | parent

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

viraptor 1 hour ago | parent

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.

OsrsNeedsf2P 57 minutes ago | parent

As someone who went down the rabbit hole of local AI, there is so much exhausting debugging already. Even if this is "just" another step you have to find, it's toxic.

yieldcrv 1 hour ago | parent

Decompile time

wewewedxfgdf 1 hour ago | parent

Remember when Apple was slowing down iPhones, the outrage!

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

villgax 53 minutes ago | parent

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

laughing_man 47 minutes ago | parent

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

alerighi 26 minutes ago | parent

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

petercooper 25 minutes ago | parent

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?