gpu-unlock kernel module doubles FP/BF16 issue rate on RTX 3000 cards
A GPL-2.0-only Linux kernel module that loads before the NVIDIA driver binds the card writes the SS0/SS1 speed selectors and performs an FLR reset to restore the full FP/BF16 FMA issue rate on GA102, GA103, GA104 and GA106 GeForce cards; it is opt-in behind a gpu_unlock.targets= kernel argument and needs no per-driver patching. Reports on a 3090 Ti at 450 W show BF16 dense 8192-cubed GEMM going from 87.5 to 157.4 TFLOPS and TF32 from 42.6 to 82.6, with matrix-heavy prefill and FlashAttention improving while decode and INT8 stay roughly flat. The repository has about 3,000 stars since its October 18 creation and reached the Hacker News front page on October 24.
Why it matters
Cheap prefill throughput on consumer 30-series cards, at the cost of a firmware hack at boot.
Importance: 2/5
Community tool with measured 1.8x BF16 throughput, not a vendor release.