There is an easy workaround developed by the Switch homebrew community, simply upgrade from within a custom firmware (such as Atmosphere-NX) and run a tool called ChoiDuJourNX which bypasses the fuse-burning.<p>If you're careful you can keep a backup trail going all the way back to your original device firmware and restore/downgrade it using the Hekate system tool. It has already been pointed out that there isn't much reason to do this, AFAIK the main reason people either held out on older firmwares or kept up a backup trail to them was in order to take advantage of possible firmware-version-specific exploits, the gold standard being a coldboot exploit.
> There are 256 bits in the set of ODM_RESERVED fuses, and there are 8 ODM_RESERVED. This allows for 32 fuses, or 32 future FW versions (provided they burn a fuse on every major release).<p>Can someone explain how the author gets from the numbers 256 and 8 to the count of 32 fuses?
I'm unclear on how these hardware fuses actually work. Are they actual fuses that can be burnt on will by excessive power?<p>When the article says:<p>> The boot loader verifies a specific fuse, FUSE_RESERVED_ODM7, to prevent downgrading. Each software version expects a different number of fuses to be blown [...]<p>Does this mean FUSE_RESERVED_ODM7 actually contains multiple fuses?
This was already in use in other game system (for example the xbox 360, see <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_eFUSE" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_eFUSE</a> )
Why do they bother with this if someone is going to make a software workaround? Seems like people who would look to downgrade firmware might also be the same that would be able to implement the workaround.
A few questions:<p>1. What was the intended use case behind the Tegra having 32 blowable fuses? Did Nvidia intend for those fuses to be used in this manner?<p>2. What is a non-retail switch?