On Thu, 19 Jul 2012, Mark Nelson wrote:
On 19/07/12 11:06, David Griffith wrote:
On Thu, 19 Jul 2012, Mark Nelson wrote:
Actually no, SLI support isn't anything to do with the actual chipset
hardware (provided the chipset has the required number of PCI Express
lanes and physical slots of course ;) ).
SLI certification (and so SLI support) is nVidia's way of controlling
which platforms can run their GPUs in SLI mode (and making money out
of it all of course). Board makers that want SLI support pay the
appropriate licensing fees to nVidia (and submit their board models to
nVidia for qualification) and they then receive a special key that
they embed in their BIOSs which nVidia's drivers look for before
enabling SLI.
I see. So, what does this mean for people who want to run a pair of
nVidea boards on a coreboot board in SLI mode?
Yeah, it probably means native SLI support (without modified drivers) is out
of the question. It is plausible that the coreboot end-user could extract the
key from an SLI-certified 990FX motherboard's BIOS and somehow incorporate it
into the coreboot firmware I suppose. Similar tricks were done for early
low-end X58 motherboards that didn't include the key in their BIOSs but were
part of a family of boards where the higher-end offerings were SLI certified.
I'd imagine that users worried about a feature like SLI support probably
won't be using coreboot (at least at this stage), but it is something to keep
in mind for the future.
Heh, I looked again at the article you showed me and right there it says
that nVidia anticipates BIOS modders would indeed add the the cookie into
their hacked BIOSes, so, there we are.
--
David Griffith
d...@661.org
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