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      Nvidia’s new app doesn’t require you to log in to update your GPU driver

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Thursday, 22 February - 21:11 · 1 minute

    Nvidia app promo image

    Enlarge (credit: Nvidia)

    Nvidia has announced a public beta of a new app for Windows, one that does a few useful things and one big thing.

    The new app combines the functions of three apps you'd previously have to hunt through—the Nvidia Control Panel, GeForce Experience, and RTX Experience—into one app. Setting display preferences on games and seeing exactly how each notch between "Performance" and "Quality" will affect its settings is far easier and more visible inside the new app. The old-fashioned control panel is still there if you right-click the Nvidia app's notification panel icon. Installing the new beta upgrades and essentially removes the Experience and Control Panel apps, but they're still available online.

    But perhaps most importantly, Nvidia's new app allows you to update the driver for your graphics card, the one you paid for, without having to log in to an Nvidia account. I tested it, it worked, and I don't know why I was surprised, but I've been conditioned that way. Given that driver updates are something people often do with new systems and the prior tendencies of Nvidia's apps to log you out, this is a boon that will pay small but notable cumulative dividends for some time to come.

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      Microsoft signing keys keep getting hijacked, to the delight of Chinese threat actors

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 25 August, 2023 - 13:17 · 1 minute

    Microsoft signing keys keep getting hijacked, to the delight of Chinese threat actors

    Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

    In July, security researchers revealed a sobering discovery: hundreds of pieces of malware used by multiple hacker groups to infect Windows devices had been digitally signed and validated as safe by Microsoft itself. On Tuesday, a different set of researchers made a similarly solemn announcement: Microsoft’s digital keys had been hijacked to sign yet more malware for use by a previously unknown threat actor in a supply-chain attack that infected roughly 100 carefully selected victims.

    The malware, researchers from Symantec’s Threat Hunter Team reported , was digitally signed with a certificate for use in what is alternatively known as the Microsoft Windows Hardware Developer Program and the Microsoft Windows Hardware Compatibility Program . The program is used to certify that device drivers—the software that runs deep inside the Windows kernel—come from a known source and that they can be trusted to securely access the deepest and most sensitive recesses of the operating system. Without the certification, drivers are ineligible to run on Windows.

    Hijacking keys to the kingdom

    Somehow, members of this hacking team—which Symantec is calling Carderbee—managed to get Microsoft to digitally sign a type of malware known as a rootkit. Once installed, rootkits become what’s essentially an extension of the OS itself. To gain that level of access without tipping off end-point security systems and other defenses, the Carderbee hackers first needed its rootkit to receive the Microsoft seal of approval, which it got after Microsoft signed it.

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      Hackers exploit gaping Windows loophole to give their malware kernel access

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 11 July, 2023 - 20:07

    Hackers exploit gaping Windows loophole to give their malware kernel access

    Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

    Hackers are using open source software that’s popular with video game cheaters to allow their Windows-based malware to bypass restrictions Microsoft put in place to prevent such infections from occurring.

    The software comes in the form of two software tools that are available on GitHub. Cheaters use them to digitally sign malicious system drivers so they can modify video games in ways that give the player an unfair advantage. The drivers clear the considerable hurdle required for the cheat code to run inside the Windows kernel, the fortified layer of the operating system reserved for the most critical and sensitive functions.

    Researchers from Cisco’s Talos security team said Tuesday that multiple Chinese-speaking threat groups have repurposed the tools—one called HookSignTool and the other FuckCertVerifyTimeValidity. Instead of using the kernel access for cheating, the threat actors use it to give their malware capabilities it wouldn’t otherwise have.

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      Four-person dev team gets Apple’s M-series GPU working in Linux

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 7 December, 2022 - 17:46 · 2 minutes

    SuperTuxKart running on an Asahi Linux system, with Debian logo in terminal

    Enlarge / Has any game been more associated with proof of concept than SuperTuxKart? It's the "Hello World" of 3D racing. (credit: Asahi Linux)

    For the brave people running Linux on Apple Silicon, their patience has paid off. GPU drivers that provide desktop hardware acceleration are now available in Asahi Linux , unleashing more of the M-series chips’ power.

    It has taken roughly two years to reach this alpha-stage OpenGL driver, but the foundational groundwork should result in faster progress ahead, writes project leads Alyssa Rosenzweig and Asahi Lina. In the meantime, the drivers are “good enough to run a smooth desktop experience and some games.”

    The drivers offer non-conformance-tested OpenGL 2.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0 support for all M-series Apple devices. That’s enough for desktop environments and older games running at 60 frames per second at 4K. But the next target is Vulkan support . OpenGL work is being done “with Vulkan in mind,” Lina writes, but some OpenGL support was needed to get desktops working first. There's a lot more you can read about the interplay between OpenGL, Vulkan, and Zink in Asahi's blog post .

    For a while now, Asahi Linux has been making do with software-rendered desktops, but M-series chips are fast enough that they feel almost native (and sometimes faster than other desktops on ARM hardware). And while the Asahi project is relatively new , some core bits of Apple's silicon are backward compatible with known and supported devices, like the original iPhone. And Asahi's work is intended to move upstream, helping other distributions get up and running on Apple's hardware.

    The team of developers includes three core members—Rosenzweig, Lina, and Dougall Johnson—plus Ella Stanforth, who works on Vulkan drivers and future reuse. The developers note that their work stands "on the shoulders of FOSS giants." That includes the NIR backend, the Direct Rendering Manager in the Linux kernel, and the Gallium3D API inside the open source Mesa drivers, which themselves build on 30 years of OpenGL work.

    Installing the new drivers requires running a bleeding-edge kernel, Mesa drivers, and a Wayland-based desktop. The team welcomes bug reports, but not of the "this specific app isn't working" variety. Their blog post details how and where to submit reports about certain kinds of GPU-specific issues.

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      NVIDIA 510.39.01 Beta driver out for Linux

      news.movim.eu / GamingOnLinux · Tuesday, 11 January, 2022 - 15:29 · 2 minutes · 3 visibility

    After silently launching the RTX 3080 12GB , NVIDIA has also today put out a brand new Beta driver for Linux with version 510.39.01 now available.

    The interesting part is, the changelog mentions quite a number of things that were added in previous driver releases like support for the GBM API. There's also mentions of extensions that were added in previous stable releases too. It's likely that this will be their new "Production Branch" driver that has pulled over lots of changes from their "New Feature Branch". Confused? NVIDIA explain it like so:

    Production Branch Production Branch drivers provide ISV certification and optimal stability and performance for Unix customers. This driver is most commonly deployed at enterprises, providing support for the sustained bug fix and security updates commonly required.

    New Feature Branch New Feature Branch drivers provide early adopters and bleeding edge developers access to the latest driver features before they are integrated into the Production Branches

    Some extensions have jumped over in 510.39.01 from their other standalone Vulkan Beta Drivers though, and some are newly supported like these:

    • VK_EXT_depth_clip_control
    • VK_EXT_border_color_swizzle
    • VK_EXT_image_view_min_lod
    • VK_KHR_shader_integer_dot_product
    • VK_EXT_primitive_topology_list_restart
    • VK_EXT_load_store_op_none
    • VK_KHR_maintenance4
    • VK_KHR_format_feature_flags2
    • VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering

    With Dynamic Rendering (VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering) being one of the major additions, something that The Khronos Group announced in late 2021 that many developers seemed excited about. This release newly brings AV1 decode support to the NVIDIA VDPAU driver, and brings on an optimization for the Vulkan fullscreen presentation path for X11 and direct-to-display swapchains.

    Some of the bug fixes include:

    • Fixed several issues which caused the supported-gpus.json file to contain incorrect product information.
    • Fixed a bug that caused the nvidia-settings control panel to report inaccurate ECC error counts, and completely prevented the reporting of aggregate ECC error counts. ECC error counts reported by nvidia-smi were not affected.
    • Fixed a bug which caused Vulkan applications to hang when the __GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS environment variable was set to enable threaded optimizations in the NVIDIA driver.
    • Fixed a bug where calls to vkWaitForPresentKHR would fail with VK_TIMEOUT on Maxwell and Pascal GPUs.
    • Fixed a bug in the Vulkan compiler where 64-bit atomics were partially broken.
    • Fixed a bug in the Vulkan driver where VK_NULL_HANDLE was not properly handled as input to VkRenderingFragmentShadingRateAttachmentInfoKHR.imageView.
    • Fixed a bug in the Vulkan driver where the SPIR-V Centroid interpolation decoration was not ignored when used in conjunction with FragCoord.
    • Fixed a bug in the Vulkan driver where unreferenced descriptor bindings were sometimes not ignored properly.
    • Fixed a bug in the Vulkan driver where vkCmdBindDescriptorSets would not properly handle pDynamicOffsets for compute pipelines.
    • Fixed a bug which caused OpenGL and Vulkan applications to generate excessive traffic over dbus while attempting to communicate with nvidia-powerd, even though nvidia-powerd was not running.
    • Fixed a bug in the Vulkan driver where some Ray Tracing shaders would timeout, resulting in device loss.
    Article from GamingOnLinux.com taken from the RSS feed.
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      XTW100 Mini Programmer Schematic and Driver

      pubsub.slavino.sk / onetransistor · Friday, 28 August, 2020 - 18:43 edit

    I recently found a new serial programmer, the XTW100 Mini Programmer which is supposed to be an "upgraded" variant of the well-known CH341A Mini Programmer . Having a similar price to CH341A, I didn't wait any longer and ordered myself one. With a PCB slightly bigger (in length) than the PCB of CH341A, this new device is built around an STM32 ARM microcontroller. Having native USB port and hardware I2C and SPI, these microcontrollers with proper firmware could do a good job for this purpose.

    Yet, there are some advertised features of this programmer that seem to good to be true (for a 4 USD programmer). Just as I did with the CH341A, I will try to draw the schematic and look for drivers and software for this XTW100 memory programmer. Because the STM32 is a 3.3 V device I can say for sure that this programmer will not have the 5 V bus levels issue. I got my XTW100 from AliExpress / WAVGAT store.

    Product photo of XTW100 programmer

    Product photo of XTW100 programmer

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    Značky: #SPI, #I2C, #Programmer, #Drivers, #Elektro, #Electronics