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Comment by LatticeAnimal | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know if there is there any way to prevent the Nvidia drivers from accessing the internet on Linux?

I would think that I could just add it to some no-internet group or something but I am not sure if Nvidia could bypass that given that they have a physical card on the PCIe bus.

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You could pass the device into a VM that either lacks a network interface or which otherwise has no viable route.

Extrapolating a bit (regardless of whether or not this is a hoax), we may soon live in a world where GPUs won't compute certain workloads unless they're able to phone home via a connection associated with a registered identity.

Is it possible for the GPU to communicate directly with the network card? I don't know enough about this area of the stack. I can't find anything on the internet about this

https://lwn.net/Articles/823738/

That might be tough on Linux since it's a binary blob in kernel space

Presumably that level of access supersedes any kind of userspace access controls

if it's being loaded at hypervisor layer via vfio-pci, then within the KVM VM it loads the nvidia binary blob, even if at the KVM layer it has kernel space privs, at the hypervisor layer it does not.

ooof. I remember discussing how effective those drivers were compared to the open source AMD ones a few years back. Now the open AMD drivers are good and there is all more more reason to be skeptical of the binary blob.

"stallman was right"

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