Nvidia RTX Spark encrypted firmware slows inference speed to 35% on Linux (mindstudio.ai)

194 pointsby novaRom4 hours ago103 comments

K0balt 3 hours ago

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 3 hours ago

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 3 hours ago

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

novaRom 2 hours ago

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 2 hours ago

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

jval43 an hour ago

AI is actually the perfect use case for homomorphic encryption.

I wonder if this space is explored fully enough at the moment.

Aside from some implementation details, it's conceptually much easier than doing it for a SQL database.

sva_ 3 hours ago

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

AlAjem 2 hours ago

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 2 hours ago

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

ReptileMan an hour ago

Or buy Huawei ascend...

Geof25 7 minutes ago

Is DRM going to work considering how good LLMs are in reverse engineering? I would say it is a fools errand at this point.

motbus3 2 hours ago

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 2 hours ago

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.

esseph an hour ago

Isn't this something apple has been in legal trouble over?

Yep, "Batterygate"

https://www.npr.org/2020/11/18/936268845/apple-agrees-to-pay...

mschuster91 28 minutes ago

> 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.

It saves the car manufacturer on logistics cost. The per-unit cost of a seat heater is (much) smaller than the cost related to keeping two variants of seat in stock and to provide spare parts. Say the heating mat costs 100€ per seat including materials and installation, and can be sold to the customer for 400€ permanent, that means as long as 1 in 4 customers buys the seat heating option, the books are balanced, and all money you save on logistics is pure profit.

Adding subscription on top of that is financially even better, if there is one thing companies LOVE thanks to stonk market incentives it is monthly recurring revenue.

motbus3 12 minutes ago

You are absolutely right! (Couldn't resist the ai pun)

I think more than that, it is probably a lie they tell us that you are not paying for the hardware/equipment.

motbus3 14 minutes ago

Tesla do the same and I am not sure but someone told me Chevrolet and Audi have same "solutions" in place

duskdozer 2 hours ago

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 2 hours ago

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 2 hours ago

>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 an hour ago

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 2 hours ago

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 an hour ago

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.

embedding-shape an hour ago

Unless the US somehow differs from the EU in some major ways, can't you just walk into a store and buy a NVIDIA GPU? Not sure how much easier it can get. And yes, it's as easy in China to, walk into store, point at GPU, fork over the money, you get your GPU. Like everywhere else, except the US I suppose?

hsuduebc2 an hour ago

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.

hoppp an hour ago

Yes, in everything.

I stopped using my laptop for dev and switched to talking to claude code on my phone and as you can imagine I am faster at producing code.

100% cloud with a single entry point device to manage dedicated servers + agents

FartyMcFarter an hour ago

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

[Hanlon's Razor] This is such a contrived performance drop scenario that I find it hard to believe it was done with the purpose you're inferring.

I'd interpret this as Nvidia not caring that much about Linux desktops/laptops once again (as opposed to Windows desktops/laptops), rather than anything to do with local vs cloud.

f6v an hour ago

> Build and maintain sovereign AI while you still can.

As in, make your own inference and training hardware?

embedding-shape an hour ago

No, when people talk about building software they tend to mean building software. Just like "putting together my own training hardware" doesn't imply you're creating your own wafers from sand.

f6v 18 minutes ago

But the original post was about a hardware vendor getting in the way. It's pointless to talk about "sovereign AI" when all you do is run GLM on Nvidia.

joshspankit an hour ago

Remember this is the same company that stopped GTX/RTX users from hardware encoding more than 2 video streams at the same time

jleask 3 hours ago

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 2 hours ago

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

jleask an hour ago

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 an hour ago

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 an hour ago

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 an hour ago

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...

maxhille an hour ago

AFAIK the open source kernel driver pushes a signed proprietary 500Mb firmware blob into the GPU.

NekkoDroid 16 minutes ago

The total linux-firmware-nvidia package for Archlinux uncompressed (outer, the firmware blobs are also compressed on top of that) is ~160MB (Mb would be Megabit), with the biggest individual compressed blob being ~50MB.

wqtz an hour ago

> we've allowed a company

When did "we" have a say in this? I don't get these types of comments from the "open-source as a community."

Nvidia has been doing this for decades, and there are two possible arguments:

1. They are successful despite it.

2. They are successful because of it.

There is no mythical collective "we" representing the open-source community in Nvidia's supply chain of success. It's Nvidia and its consumers.

nibbula 11 minutes ago

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.

fxwin 3 hours ago

> 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 3 hours ago

> sparks my interest

I see what you did there. ;)

teiferer 2 hours ago

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 2 hours ago

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

fxwin 2 hours ago

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. I don't know what Talarico speech you are talking about, so i won't comment on that (But I'm not sure if political speeches are the best rebuttal to "I think obviously AI generated text is an indicator of low signal-to-noise ratio").

Edit re "equivalent to not liking the speaker's tie": This is not equivalent at all, this is a written blog post and I'm put off by the way it is written, not by say the URL or their chosen font. It's more akin to a speaker dropping an inappropriate joke at the start of their talk and leaving because of that

IshKebab 36 minutes ago

Speeches have always over-used these writing techniques. The problem is Claude uses them all the time, even when not writing speeches.

quietbritishjim 24 minutes ago

"Why XYZ still wins" is also a very common pattern for Claude. Granted it's also found in pre-Claude clickbait titles.

geoffhill 11 minutes ago

Please be aware that you have been the target of foreign anti-AI influence campaigns. Your comment history makes it clear they have had a strong negative effect on you.

fxwin 6 minutes ago

What an odd response

laughing_man 2 hours ago

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

adrian_b 38 minutes ago

Not really, because for more than 2 decades the closed-source NVIDIA Linux drivers were at parity of features and performance with the Windows drivers, unlike the AMD drivers before they were open-sourced, which was much more recently.

This is a new thing with the firmware that can be used only by Windows. If this NVIDIA policy continues, then NVIDIA will indeed become a bad choice for Linux, but until now, for graphics and AI applications NVIDIA has been the best choice for Linux, by providing the best performance and reliability.

For pure computational applications, especially for those requiring good FP64 throughput, there are many years since NVIDIA has become a worse choice than AMD and more recently also than Intel, but that is due to poor hardware support, not to bad software support.

schaefer 3 hours ago

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

sampo 3 hours ago

Looks like the site has fixed the title.

AdamConwayIE an hour ago

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...

stevefan1999 7 minutes ago

This reason alone is why I rather stay on Strix Halo

hypfer 3 hours ago

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 3 hours ago

Good point, fixed, thanks.

viraptor 2 hours ago

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 2 hours ago

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.

Neywiny an hour ago

Yeah I'm giving all my RAM to Sam Altman tomorrow because of that

sva_ 3 hours ago

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 3 hours ago

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

barrkel 3 hours ago

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 3 hours ago

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 2 hours ago

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

jeroenhd 2 hours ago

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.

c7b 7 minutes ago

Local AI is an expensive hobby. You're paying big money for small performance (so mainly for the feeling of "owning it", which is a great motivator). It can't match cloud services, not absolutely nor bang-for-buck, especially if you look a bit for cheaper and freebie options. As someone who loves and promotes local AI, in the situation you described my plea would be to use that money to improve your situation more directly (move out, get support,...). The cost of a laptop that can run somewhat decent models should buy you at least several months of therapy (@1 session/week).

Danox 2 hours ago

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

pixelpoet 3 hours ago

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 2 hours ago

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 2 hours ago

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

dlahoda 2 hours ago

private memory.

unique local data and know how not shared with cloud.

KeplerBoy 2 hours ago

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

alerighi an hour ago

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

ilaksh 22 minutes ago

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.

khgihpipihkjdsg an hour ago

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.

blks 25 minutes ago

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

petercooper an hour ago

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?

impossiblefork 3 hours ago

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 2 hours ago

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 2 hours ago

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.

throw93030e79 32 minutes ago

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!

PcChip 26 minutes ago

Agreed, i bet they will fix this quickly to help sell more units

throwawayffffas an hour ago

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

wewewedxfgdf 2 hours ago

Remember when Apple was slowing down iPhones, the outrage!

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

ChiliPie 2 hours ago

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

rich_sasha 3 hours ago

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.

aa-jv 3 hours ago

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 3 hours ago

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

aa-jv 3 hours ago

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 3 hours ago

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 an hour ago

The ecosystem and community 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.

FartyMcFarter an hour ago

> conniptions

TIL. Nice word.

m00dy an hour ago

just reverse engineer the firmware...

yieldcrv 2 hours ago

Decompile time