How the Nintendo Switch prevents downgrades by irreparably blowing its own fuses

Re:How the Nintendo Switch prevents downgrades by irreparabl... by mlyle on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @02:11AM (#23536381)

Fuses and OTP are a very common thing to throw in to systems. Most microcontrollers offer capabilities like this, and now they're drifting into more general purpose, larger SOCs. Maybe you use it to keep a serial number, or to separate product families, or for something like this.

Tegra's main purpose of the fuses is to handle holding cryptographic keys, boot parameters, and to disable the debug port. But since they have a fuse unit already, they provide a few words for the end-user to use as they please.

I too am curious what "non-retail" means in this context.

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Re:How the Nintendo Switch prevents downgrades by irreparabl... by sirn on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @02:38AM (#23536507)

>I too am curious what "non-retail" means in this context.

Maybe dev kits? AFAIK Switch has at least two dev kits (SDEV/EDEV) for different purposes so it kinda makes sense to call them non-retail.

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Re:How the Nintendo Switch prevents downgrades by irreparabl... by Luuseens on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @02:45AM (#23536540)

"non-retail" are usually either devkits, or units used for demo stands in shops.

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