Table of Contents

Driver Timeout Patch

If you are receiving one of the following errors:

Then you should apply one of the following patches depending on your OS.

Background

While running hashcat with extreme performance settings (-w 3 or -w 4) users may experience crashes, followed by automatic recovery of the GPU(s) via driver reset. This is caused by kernel runtimes that exceed the 2-second limit. This feature is useful for preventing screen freezes, but not useful for hash cracking.

Windows

To disable WDDM recovery, create a file called wddm_timeout_patch.reg with the following contents:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\GraphicsDrivers]
"TdrLevel"=dword:00000000

Run this registry file as Administrator and reboot.

Linux

Add a line “Interactive” in /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Device0"
    ...
    Option         "Interactive"        "False"
EndSection

You might need to restart X11 or reboot your system entirely before this change works and the warning in hashcat disappears.

Newer versions of Ubuntu (and maybe other distributions as well) do not use xorg.conf any longer. Alternatively they use the folder /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/ where you can put in snippets of the config. Create a new file, call it “20-nvidia.conf” and put in the following content:

Section "Device"
Identifier "MyGPU"
Driver "nvidia"
Option "Interactive" "0"
EndSection

You may need to restart the system afterwards.