Backing up GPU ROM for new machine (what to expect)?

[storkinsj]

Hi all,
Very new so sorry for the probably dumb question. I did not see an FAQ.

Looks like I have a card that has not been seen yet with GPU-Z. I submitted a validation.

I would like to get the oprom for the card of course it's not up on the site yet.

Is there a proactive step I should take or just wait to hear back?

 

[W1zzard]

To the right of the BIOS version is a button "Save BIOS". Does that work to save and upload?

 

[storkinsj]

Yes it says not supported on this GPU.

 

[W1zzard]

Hmm ... AMDVBFlash can save the BIOS?

 

[storkinsj]

oooooooh. I have never heard of that; keep you posted.

Looks like potentially ESXi does it too. See pcipSaveOPROM boot option.

That's actually my use case. Passing the option rom into the VM using UEFI bios so that the card bios is accessible to a VM.

This seems to help with MacOS and probably windows too. Although the modern OS's seem to ditch BIOS once everything is up and running... Mac OS still sort of needs it to show the boot screen and a few other things.

Looks like neither will work. Attaching shots.

I will attempt the esxi route.

BTW, my guess was that by opening the "validation" that the GPU-Z gets adjusted somehow. Sounds like that's the wrong expectation.

G

 

[storkinsj]

No dice so far with ESX even though that option really seems like it would save the oprom.

 

[P4-630]

Apple GPU on Windows...Hmm..

 

[Assimilator]

It's Apple. The BIOS is likely stored in a completely different way to how every other GPU in the world works, because Apple so no tool will ever be able to read it. I'm honestly surprised that Windows is able to detect it and load drivers for it.

 

[storkinsj]

Well, there's this really big list of oproms- all working examples of Apple as subvendor. Including this recent Radeon pro. It's possible something like AMDVBFlash grabbed them from windows, but I don't know.

I had a sapphire card in here for 2 years; it was noisy but fast. The WX6900 is the same basic card but uses the computer fans to cool it.

If I want to game with this thing, I can. Real well.

But right now I just want to get back to being able to load the oprom from ESXi so that I can use the hardware acceleration. It was an oprom from this site I used to do that previously.

I would love to find out who contributed the Radeon Pro from 2019 and what method they used.

 

[storkinsj]

Follow on question: What does submitting a Validation do? I am suspecting based on the very quick response of the program that it is simply looking up my device ID and because it is not in the database yet, it immediately "abends" with "Bios Reading not supported on this device". A second question would be how does it know? Is it based on an attempt to read the bios or by seeing if the device ID is in the database?

It seems possible that the purpose of submitting validations is to update the database so that someone can take an action to verify the card exists and then simply add it to the database. But I'd rather not guess of course I'd just like to know.

 

[storkinsj]

Looks like I was saved by Aliens; specifically "Space Invader".

I was able to pull the oprom using UNRAID and a simple script he created to dump the oprom. Super clean and very impressed with UNRAID- it basically saw 99% of the devices on the mac and immediately made it into a powerful NAS/Hypervisor. But I just needed it for this one step.

Youtube Video

Open Source repository for script

Note that as space invader says, with a little work that script could be adopted for regular linux. But creating an unraid server on USB and launching it was so painless for the weirdest hardware I could throw at it- I think much easier to go this route.

@W1zzard I would be happy to contribute the oprom to techpowerup.

 

[W1zzard]

Nice find. This does not dump the VBIOS metadata on NVIDIA btw, so you won't be able to use the dump to flash the card using NVFlash

 

[storkinsj]

Hi thanks for that.

It is already working to solve sort of the same problem they solve in the video - getting a virtual machine to boot up with direct hardware access to the GPU. Otherwise it won't boot.
Anything I can do to help you out let me know. There will not be many of these cards out there. I saw the update on your site about the card- great work. Just let me know how I can help ; I have the hardware.

No I'm not doing bitcoin mining at the moment lol. The card packs all the performance I need right now but down the road....

 

[storkinsj]

(BTW not an nvidia card as you can see above- AMD 6900 Big Navi).

 

[storkinsj]

I saw the update on GPU-Z to support the card. I just submitted the oprom to the site. Thank you.

 

[storkinsj]

Well... Not having the luck I have had with other oproms fwiw.

 

[meatwar]

@storkinsj

Try the DarwinDumper on macOS, it will collect a lot of dumps.

EDIT: The app is powerful as is uses LSPCI, RADEONdecoder etc... all option in app is user selected, i've always used on my Macs.
Go read a bit about it, theres info on it even here on the forum from users experiences.
Macrumores, InsnelyMac etc...
I cant assure you that can extract from your card but it doesnt harm the system.

 

[storkinsj]

Will it pull the oprom out of the video card? That's really all I need to do.
The computer is working fine.

 

[storkinsj]

I tried to dump information about the bios file extracted using GPU-Z with the amdvbflash_win_5.0.567 that came out in March. I got the following

amdvbflash.exe --show --vbios-file ..\oproms\W6900X.rom --vbios-info

The ROM Image file: ..\oproms\W6900X.rom is not a valid AMD GPU ROM Image.

Trying to save out the vbios with amdvbflash.exe -s newflash.rom:

Detecting AMD GPU/APU. Please wait...
VBIOS related functionality not supported for Device: 0x73a2

Unsupported GPU.

I did make sure to install the driver first.

So yeah, don't think I'm getting the actual rom yet.