Is it legal to discover new Nvidia registry entries using reverse engineering #638
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Hello, I'm a learning PC tweaker and in a few weeks will be divoding my time for 2 years to learning more about computers. I have understood that reverse engineering is legal dependent on use case , terms of service and license. I have came across Savitarax's video on modifying the Nvidia registry in his video he gives a few links to open source Nvidia kernel links , he also gives a guide explaining the kernel and a long list of traced Nvidia kernel entrys. There are many kernel entrys I'm curious of discovering dwords for the located registries. Savitarax encourages people to discover more values. I have read the MIT license found in Nvidias various GitHub kernel pages. The license doesn't specify discovering new registries that are not found in areas of registrys in the GitHub links. As it states it is free to modify, etc does this mean I can find new registrys and make discoverys. I am 14 so I do not fully understand what the agreement fully allows by the reason but I am learning day by day on the subject of licenses. Here are all the links I've found https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/nouveau/2013-December/015328.html time cards traced dwordshttps://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/blob/main/src/nvidia/interface/nvrm_registry.h https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules?tab=readme-ov-file |
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Replies: 26 comments 57 replies
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Here's Savitarax's YouTube video : https://youtu.be/K2TO7SJfYwE?si=agciAnPZ4boLjtm8 |
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Yes it is legal |
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Okay, I kinda misunderstood you. The Windows registry is a part of Windows Operating System and it's used by it and other programs to store configuration data, including Nvidia drivers (but not ones found in this repo, Windows drivers, which are proprietary and licensed under License For Customer Use of NVIDIA Software) Neither Windows License Terms (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/UseTerms/Retail/Windows/11/UseTerms_Retail_Windows_11_English.htm), nor Nvidia's License For Customer Use of NVIDIA Software (https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/nvidia-license/) prohibit you from accessing (discovering) and/or modifying the registry. TLDR; it's still legal |
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So I can discover anything, I mean RM , stuff , nvddklmm, and all that Nvidia power gatting, etc. |
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So stuff like this is completely legal |
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Yeah |
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Correct me if I'm wrong but the Nvidia link is still relevant. |
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Thank you, wait so I can even find new windows tweaks in the registry! |
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Assuming same terms for 10 too |
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Yeah I know about both of these , I've got much faster than atlas though , atlas is a 6% performance difference to stock maxed out , with nvcleaninstall everything. |
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Just wanted to point them out, so you don't put your effort in and discover things that are already discovered |
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Wanna share the keys? I would like to test them. |
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I'm no longer a public PC tweaker until I'm 16 which is in 2026. I am going to read lots of books , win internals 7th edition, powershell, reverse engineering, c ,c# ,c++ and a few others. I could send you ones that someone else discovered. |
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No that's fine, thanks |
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Thank you so much @qbers0 |
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Glad I could help |
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This thread is all over the place and there's a lot of confusion going on. The Nvidia driver registry is not related to the Windows registry. Yes, technically on Windows, the Nvidia driver stores its registry key/value pairs in the Windows registry database, but that's a technicality. The Nvidia driver registry exists on Linux, where there is obviously no Windows registry. On Linux, the Nvidia driver registry is initialized with hard-coded values in the driver source code, as well as any additional items specified on the driver command line. Please also note that Nouveau now supports setting Nvidia driver registry entries on the command line also. These registry entries are passed to GSP-RM as-is, without any checking. So you can use Nouveau to "discover" new registry keys that way. |
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You sure it's on windows, and is this automatable with powershell |
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Sorry, I just watched the video linked, read some licences and wrote my conclusions, I didn't dig into technicalities. But this doesn't change anything since @ElephantTweakerdeblaterSAK seems to be interested only in Windows, just makes that part of my comment where I linked Windows Licence Terms irrelevant. It's still legal - this is the main thing he wanted to know. |
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Technically I could learn Linux too, but how is it irrelevant |
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Since they are not related, the Windows Licence Terms have nothing to do with it. |
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Yea the Nvidia driver registry only exists after you get a Nvidia driver installed. |
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This is what I mostly mean , but I also want to change nvddklmm |
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I don't know why people keep talking about Windows. Th open-gpu-kernel-module driver exists only on Linux. As for legality, I cannot comment on that, but in general, reverse-engineering closed-source code (which the Windows driver is) is almost always not allowed by the software license. But I can tell you that you're not going to get very far trying to reverse engineer the Nvidia registry keys. 99% of the keys are interpreted by only by GSP-RM, which is the closed-source binary. You can get a list of keys by doing this:
But that will only tell you the names of the keys, not what they do. In addition, some of the keys are "secret", which means they are only of the form "RM[0-9]*". You can try playing with the other keys by setting them to random values (many of them are just switches, so they are either =0 or =1), but it would be black-box reverse engineering. And 99% of the time you wouldn't notice what they do. But then what? The ones that are not secret are almost all documented somewhere (e.g. https://docs.nvidia.com/networking/display/winof2v31052010lts/configuring+the+driver+registry+keys#src-132450587_ConfiguringtheDriverRegistryKeys-BasicRegistryKeys). And most of the rest are intended to enable some obscure work-around for some broken obscure hardware and/or BIOS, often for a GPU that Nvidia doesn't sell any more. So you're going to do a significant amount of work and you will learn almost nothing from it. If you really want to spend two years learning about computers, there are much smarter things to learn, like how to write GPU drivers in Linux. Or you can learn Rust and help review/enhance the new Nova Linux driver for Nvidia GPUs. Seriously, reverse engineering the driver's registry keys is colossal waste of time. I actually have access to the driver's source code, and I can look up what all of these keys do. This is how I was able to add registry key support to Nouveau. But you know what? It's probably the most boring part of our driver, and certainly the most boring part of any GPU driver. |
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Pretty sure they are open source, go to my very first message, I link multiple things, and the Linux power gatting stuff is the same as the windows. |
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I'm not spending 2 years on the driver , I'm spending 2 years learning about more PC tweaking, I'm going to read windows internals 7th edition, powershell books , lots of coding books , etc. I'm going to be learning a lot. Not sure if your a little mixed up but based on a vid it only takes minutes he used process monitor. He then did some math and got a result , is this legal? |
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Learning about PC tweaking is a long journey and I think reading these books are a great start , I'm not sure if you thought I was just spending all my time with just drivers but I think this is worth it. |
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I am learning rust but for a different reason |
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My main goal is to help people improve computing, including optimizing behaviors, etc with proper testing, I specifically want to test disabling power gatting and power savers for now. My goal is to improve without raising power consumption but I want to make something for advanced users. |
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If this doesn't exist on windows how were these traced : https://github.com/djdallmann/GamingPCSetup/blob/b3e1c835ce9e6ab1ed7c93b34360f2435f22a497/CONTENT/RESEARCH/FINDINGS/registrykeys_displayadapter_class_4d36e968-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318.txt#L233 |
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I'm a little confused |
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As an Nvidia employee, I can't tell you what is or isn't legal. But it doesn't matter, because you can't trust anything that anyone else says here either. What if some random person were to tell you, "Sure, it's legal" and it turns out that he's wrong, or lying, or confused about what you're talking about? Then you might get in trouble. But you're missing my point. There are a million things you can study over the next two years. If you're not sure whether something in particular is legal, then learn something else! "Reverse engineering" the Nvidia driver is a huge waste of your time. You will do a lot of work and learn nothing of value. If you want to learn how GPU drivers work, there are many fully open source drivers in the Linux kernel that you can study instead. |
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Not saying your opinion is wrong but what about people trying to get a edge on latency, their performance may be perfected but latency not so much, sure it increases power but isn't their some way and can full disable Nvidia power gatting. |
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I fell down that path before, it still is good for me to learn about licenses. |
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I can tell you right now that you are not going to improve performance by playing with registry keys. |
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I wish I could agree but I've been told that multiple times with cool things and was able to see improvements , I aggrate tests by 5 , use a no human input test ,use xperf, test a variety of games all in the same day. I may not have tested power gatting but I know people who have been reading 10+ years and have achieved major things learning about the Nvidia registry, specifically Jerry works close with businesses and is trade secrets and has definitely had his ways of improving Nvidia latency , so has real performance tweaker and billi0n. |
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Ok kid, I tried, but you're not listening to me, so I'm out. Good luck, and try not to blow up your GPU. |
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I'm sorry, all I want to know is legals , sorry. |
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One last thing, if I use measure , extensively test and read licenses on this stuff can I safely distribute a free app with a advanced experimental tab that does stuff I find, if I do find it legal. |
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I have one questions regarding that, sorry for pulling this topic up again, but I'm very curious, the regkey "DisableDynamicPstate" regkey, many people claim that it does improve performance by forcing the GPU boost state to be on all the time, but I never saw any difference except being able to overclock my GPU a bit higher (Which I find useless since I already got a 4080 and there is no need to overclock anymore). What use does it provide? |
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I didn't expect this question from you but disabling these is only useful to lock your speeds, you can do the same using other things. I will not be posting anything with results it's ultimately best to use presentMon with 5+ samples to assess the difference between different things. Honestly based on what I have read most games will automatically make your gpu run at p0 to prioritize the game , but sometimes you can gain some MHz but I say if you overclock, just keep it plain or lock it , some games will not make the gpu run at max so if you don't care about power consumption locking should be the best , use presentMon or frameview to check. |
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You may be able to find some research on it |
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Thanks for the tip by the way , I guess I can learn Linux , but with a primary focus of windows, I will need some time for Linux learning too. |
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Thanks for the help,I will comeback at the very end. So I think how I'm going to do it is start with stuff I'm sure on, read lots of books on windows, coding, etc then at the very end I will come to windows findings and Nvidia, I will probably not even do that Nvidia if you are correct, as I'm going to read about archeture, and a lot about how machines behave. I heard power gatting isn't suppost to affect performance at all as it turns off devices only when they are not even being used but Billi0n I guess as some reason or something for disabling it , mabye it adds latency when switching back and forth from on and off ? Im not truly sure. I don't want to ignore your help or opinions, so do you have any insight on the power gatting behavior. |
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I'm also going to end here
No lawyer works for free, so if you're asking on the internet, you're not going to get better answers than people reading licenses and trying to use common sense. I think it's legal, but I'm not a lawyer and could very well be wrong (and I should have noted that earlier) Also as much as I want to help you I agree with @ttabi, that you're not gonna get much. These drivers are already optimized and they even overclock your GPU by default. Even these "debloated" Windows versions gain performance by straight up disabling features. Last thing - if you have questions regarding the Windows driver, I don't think that the Linux driver repo is the best place to ask them. Edit: you couldn't ask for a better timing https://www.phoronix.com/news/DRM-Misc-6.11-Nouveau-Intel-NPU |
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I appreciate your post I have stated this before. Though I am happy to say hi to you, I kinda got startled I was actually planning to delete my GitHub today and YouTube, I've been dealing with a lot, I have only been in connect with datasone , mosol and these Nvidia developers, I decided to switch to pure learning, I go to the library almost everyday to read and learn things and I'm not really mentally ready for any social media, I appreciate it if people don't know about my private work , it's very hard for me to cope with people giving criticisms to me I prefer to hopefully come back online in 2 years but based on what I've heard from someone else , one of the people I have worked with in the past is still talking about me , mosol has told me that. It's great you figured that out but if so why are people giving registries like gatekeepers if they do nothing. One thing though is I devoded myself to learning and tweaking without public findings though I build and create them on my own if discovered. I hope your doing well. |
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Alright then, it is good to receive criticism when it's only really from people who know what to do about it, some people may say "I was once in nvidia" some people also may say that they reverse engineered, just don't take it all too seriously and try to improve on it. Have a nice day! |
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Thank you for this speech, I'm sorry if my mood seemed off. I get a little bit of shivers reading it. I have been listening to lots of things and I have practiced a little to not take it seriously, sometimes even when I know someone is wrong I still feel not so great about it. On the bright side I'm going into a much bigger environment because I'm going to high school so I hope I will hopefully start to learn more around my environment. I hope your server is doing well. I think I shouldn't delete my YouTube because some people still find it great but their is definitely some stuff that can be improved when it comes to what's out their on my channel. If you have any information regarding anything with Nvidia it will be helpful but I decided to put things I know are legal to the beginning of my journey it's been about 2 months , maybe 3 since I started I think I'm going to reserve grey side topics for the end so I can do research to ensure what I'm doing is legal when ever I come forward to discovery that requires Reverse engineering. |
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As far as I know, you can potentially pull the RM keys from the driver and look over them, adjust them via a binary map and watch the changes e.g. with benchmark tools that provide lows. You would need some kind of script that temporarily sets the driver off, giving you a blackscreen for a second and then give you a picture again, with the results of each key. |
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That's extremely cool. I would attempt this after I read my books and learn some more about architecture, etc but I'd need to verify the legality first , as you can see this whole discussion is about that very topic 🤣 |
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I have one last thing to say regarding the effect of driver registries. People have used an LDAT with Dynamic states and HDCP and note improvements using the Nvidia measuring tools. |
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What I have been looking at is simply a pure data loss beneath 48 decimal. The data loss seems to make the mouse feel more responsive, but I'm sure that's because I made a little experiment, setting the value to 65535 decimal in MouseDataQueueSize. |
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That's pretty interesting, I understand this class holds Dat and when set to low ruins the mouse, what are you trying to achieve out of this |
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Some people set it to 20, and don't experience much problems for example AdamX |
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The problems are not visible, yet could cause latency penalties, I noticed issues at 14 decimal ( AdamX is using very basic adjustments and his source cannot be trusted, he barely gives out much info regarding topics, I prefer more detailed ones or very good visual demonstrations, which Alchemy does better, yet with less knowledge of the tools he is using to measure the changes. The goal here is = fact or fiction. Who is it for? For the community in my discord server that doesn't want to spend time researching something so little. |
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You still here ? |
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Yeah I understand, what do you think of soldiering a mouse to a very
accurate testing tool.
…On Thu, Dec 12, 2024 at 7:44 AM Lawliet ***@***.***> wrote:
The problems are not visible, yet could cause latency penalties, I noticed
issues at 14 decimal (Mouse jumping, random clicking when moving the
mouse and teleporting) similar behavior to keyboard when changing the
buffer size. I'm trying to document it to fact or placebo it. For me
currently, it's a placebo and negative tweak, making it a bad option to
change and should only be fiddled with, when Windows suddenly tells you
that DataQueueSize overflowed
AdamX is using very basic adjustments and his source cannot be trusted, he
barely gives out much info regarding topics, I prefer more detailed ones or
very good visual demonstrations, which Alchemy does better, yet with less
knowledge of the tools he is using to measure the changes.
The goal here is = fact or fiction.
Who is it for? For the community in my discord server that doesn't want to
spend time researching something so little.
—
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clarification * for understanding the key use a tool that measures in micro
seconds, milliseconds might not pick up everything as mentioned earlier
look for tools with higher sample rates, and high khz sensors
On Thu, Dec 12, 2024 at 9:21 AM Shaked Aviv Knaany <
***@***.***> wrote:
… Yeah I understand, what do you think of soldiering a mouse to a very
accurate testing tool.
On Thu, Dec 12, 2024 at 7:44 AM Lawliet ***@***.***> wrote:
> The problems are not visible, yet could cause latency penalties, I
> noticed issues at 14 decimal (Mouse jumping, random clicking when moving
> the mouse and teleporting) similar behavior to keyboard when changing
> the buffer size. I'm trying to document it to fact or placebo it. For me
> currently, it's a placebo and negative tweak, making it a bad option to
> change and should only be fiddled with, when Windows suddenly tells you
> that DataQueueSize overflowed
>
> AdamX is using very basic adjustments and his source cannot be trusted,
> he barely gives out much info regarding topics, I prefer more detailed ones
> or very good visual demonstrations, which Alchemy does better, yet with
> less knowledge of the tools he is using to measure the changes.
>
> The goal here is = fact or fiction.
>
> Who is it for? For the community in my discord server that doesn't want
> to spend time researching something so little.
>
> —
> Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub
> <#638 (reply in thread)>,
> or unsubscribe
> <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/A3FLHMW353MDZPPNJF5MD2L2FGAKRAVCNFSM6AAAAABHIIXM5SVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43URDJONRXK43TNFXW4Q3PNVWWK3TUHMYTCNJUGQYDSNQ>
> .
> You are receiving this because you were mentioned.Message ID:
> <NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/repo-discussions/638/comments/11544096@
> github.com>
>
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I understand, I've never heard of anything that measures input data that's really interesting. I hope you end up figuring it out. I don't have much info regarding this. |
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It shouldn't take long to completely debunk it, as it should be logically foreseen to have a cause of dataloss when the buffers are lowered. |
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Outside of my house I just saw the video ghosti made, he was talking about what you did, it's really cool, I normally don't watch other tweakers to learn but I heard him mention your name. That's really cool that you debunked it. Fr33thy debunked it with 8 ksps on a latency tool, I bought a 65ksps latency tool. For learning about latency on free time when I'm not reading. |
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Outside of my house I just saw the video ghosti made, he was talking about what you did, it's really cool, I normally don't watch other tweakers to learn but I heard him mention your name. That's really cool that you debunked it. Fr33thy debunked it with 8 ksps on a latency tool, I bought a 65ksps latency tool. For learning about latency on free time when I'm not reading. |
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Yeah, just how it sounds currently you could have this as miscellaneous
like a section in your server at the lowest data size before data lose
occurs. Because in theory the lower it is the smaller the time it takes
even if it's an extremely small difference.
…On Thu, Dec 19, 2024, 1:42 PM Lawliet ***@***.***> wrote:
It shouldn't take long to completely debunk it, as it should be logically
foreseen to have a cause of dataloss when the buffers are lowered.
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What I said you probably shouldn't do I don't think I'd take a value
personally if I can't seem to find a different in measurement of any
latency type.
On Thu, Dec 19, 2024, 2:26 PM Shaked Aviv Knaany ***@***.***>
wrote:
… Yeah, just how it sounds currently you could have this as miscellaneous
like a section in your server at the lowest data size before data lose
occurs. Because in theory the lower it is the smaller the time it takes
even if it's an extremely small difference.
On Thu, Dec 19, 2024, 1:42 PM Lawliet ***@***.***> wrote:
> It shouldn't take long to completely debunk it, as it should be logically
> foreseen to have a cause of dataloss when the buffers are lowered.
>
> —
> Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub
> <#638 (reply in thread)>,
> or unsubscribe
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> .
> You are receiving this because you were mentioned.Message ID:
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As an Nvidia employee, I can't tell you what is or isn't legal. But it doesn't matter, because you can't trust anything that anyone else says here either. What if some random person were to tell you, "Sure, it's legal" and it turns out that he's wrong, or lying, or confused about what you're talking about? Then you might get in trouble.
But you're missing my point. There are a million things you can study over the next two years. If you're not sure whether something in particular is legal, then learn something else! "Reverse engineering" the Nvidia driver is a huge waste of your time. You will do a lot of work and learn nothing of value.
If you want to learn how GPU drivers work, there ar…