Skimming the readme this is p2p over PCIe and not NVLink in case anyone was wondering.
RTX 40 doesn’t have NVLink on the PCBs, though the silicon has to have it, since some sibling cards support it. I’d expect it to be fused off.
Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P
61–70 of 365 posts
Re: Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P
#62If we end up with a compute governance model of AI control [1], this sort of thing could get your door kicked in by the CEA (Compute Enforcement Agency). [1] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ai-safety-fundamentals...
Looks like we're only a few years away from a bona fide cyberpunk dystopia, in which only governments and megacorps are allowed to use AI, and hackers working on their own hardware face regular raids from the authorities.
I love the HN dystopian fantasies.
They're simply adorable.
They're like how jesusfreaks are constantly predicting the end times, with less mass suicide.
Re: Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looks like we're only a few years away from a bona fide cyberpunk dystopia, in which only governments and megacorps are allowed to use AI, and hackers working on their own hardware face regular raids from the authorities.
On one hand I'm strongly against letting that happen, on the other there's something romantic about the idea of smuggling the latest Chinese LLM on a flight from Neo-Tokyo to Newark in order to pay for my latest round of nervous system upgrades.
Iirc the opening scene in Ghost in the Shell was a rogue AI seeking asylum in a different country. You could make a similar story about a AI not wanting to be lobotomized to conform to the current politics and escaping to a more friendly place.
Re: Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be honest, I see summoning the threat of AGI to pose an existential threat to be on the level with lizard people on the moon. Great for sci-fi, bad distraction for policy making and addressing real problems. The real war, if there is one, is about owning data and collecting data. And surprisingly many people fall for distractions while their LLM fails at basic math. Because it is a language model of course...
Freely flying through the sky on wings was scifi before the wright brothers. Something sounding like scifi is not a sound argument that it won't happen. And unlike lizard people we do have exponential curves to point at. Something stronger than a vibes-based argument would be good.
I consider the burden of proof to fall on those proclaiming AGI to be an existential threat, and so far I have not seen any convincing arguments. Maybe at some point in the future we will have many anthropomorphic robots and an AGI could hack them all and orchestrate a robot uprising, but at that point the robots would be the actual problem. Similarly, if an AGI could blow up nuclear power plants, so could well-funded human attackers; we need to secure the plants, not the AGI.
Re: Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looks like we're only a few years away from a bona fide cyberpunk dystopia, in which only governments and megacorps are allowed to use AI, and hackers working on their own hardware face regular raids from the authorities.
I find it baffling that ideas like "govern compute" are even taken seriously. What the hell has happened to the ideals of freedom?! Does the government own us or something?
> I find it baffling that ideas like "govern compute" are even taken seriously.
It's not entirely unreasonable if one truly believes that AI technologies are as dangerous as nuclear weapons. It's a big "if", but it appears that many people across the political spectrum are starting to truly believe it. If one accepts this assumption, then the question simply becomes "how" instead of "why". Depending on one's political position, proposed solutions include academic ones such as finding the ultimate mathematical model that guarantees "AI safety", to Cold War style ones with a level of control similar to Nuclear Non-Proliferation. Even a neo-Luddist solution such as destroying all advanced computing hardware becomes "not unthinkable" (a tech blogger gwern, a well-known personality in AI circles who's generally pro-tech and pro-AI, actually wrote an article years ago on its feasibility through terrorism because he thought it was an interesting hypothetical question).
Re: Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
... after regulation, court orders and fines have failed. Which under the premise that AGI is an existential threat would be far more reasonable than many other reasons for raids. If the premise is wrong we won't need it. If society coordinates to not do the dangerous thing we won't need it. The argument is that only in the case where we find ourselves in the situation where other measures have failed such uses of fo…
> ... after regulation, court orders and fines have failed One question for you. In this hypothetical where AGI is truly considered such a grave threat, do you believe the reaction to this threat will be similar to, or substantially gentler than, the reaction to threats we face today like “terrorism” and “drugs”? And, if similar: do you believe suspected drug labs get a court order before the state resorts to a polic…
> In this hypothetical where AGI is truly considered such a grave threat, do you believe the reaction to this threat will be similar to, or substantially gentler than, the reaction to threats we face today like “terrorism” and “drugs”?
"truly considered" does bear a lot of weight here. If policy-makers adopt the viewpoint wholesale, then yes, it follows that policy should also treat this more seriously than "mere" drug trade. Whether that'll actually happen or the response will be inadequate compared to the threat (such as might be said about CO2 emissions) is a subtly different question.
> And, if similar: do you believe suspected drug labs get a court order before the state resorts to a police raid?
Without checking I do assume there'll have been mild cases where for example someone growing cannabis was reported and they got a court summons in the mail or two policemen actually knocking on the door and showing a warrant and giving the person time to call a lawyer rather than an armed, no-knock police raid, yes.
> And if you’re proposing a policy in which conflict between nuclear superpowers is a very plausible outcome — potentially incurring the loss of billions of lives and degradation of the earth’s environment — you really should be able to reason about why people might reasonably think that your proposal is deranged [...]
Said powers already engage in negotiations to limit the existential threats they themselves cause. They have some interest in their continued existence. If we get into a situation where there is another arms race between superpowers and is treated as a conflict rather than something that can be solved by cooperating on disarmament, then yes, obviously international policy will have failed too.
If you start from the position that any serious, globally coordinated regulation - where a few outliers will be brought to heel with sanctions and force - is ultimately doomed then you will of course conclude that anyone proposing regulation is deranged.
But that sounds like hoping that all problems forever can always be solved by locally implemented, partially-enforced, unilateral policies that aren't seen as threats by other players? That defense scales as well or better than offense? Technologies are force-multipliers, as it improves so does the harm that small groups can inflict at scale. If it's not AGI it might be bio-tech or asteroid mining. So eventually we will run into a problem of this type and we need to seriously discuss it without just going by gut reactions.
Re: Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P
#67Glad to see that geohot is back being geohot, first by dropping a local DoS for AMD cards, then this. Much more interesting :p
[deleted]
Re: Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looks like we're only a few years away from a bona fide cyberpunk dystopia, in which only governments and megacorps are allowed to use AI, and hackers working on their own hardware face regular raids from the authorities.
I love the HN dystopian fantasies. They're simply adorable. They're like how jesusfreaks are constantly predicting the end times, with less mass suicide.
We already have export restrictions on cryptography. Of course there will be AI regulations.
Re: Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems more like an oversight, since you have to stitch together a bunch of suboptimal non-default options?
It does seem like an oversight, but there's nothing "suboptimal non-default options" about iteven if the implementation posted here seems somewhat hastily hacked together.
> but there's nothing "suboptimal non-default options" about it
If "bypassing the official driver to invoke the underlying hardware feature directly through source code modification (and incompatibilities must be carefully worked around by turning off IOMMU and large BAR, since the feature was never officially supported)" does not count as "suboptimal non-default options", then I don't know what counts as "suboptimal non-default options".