Linux

TPM is basically never for your benefit. It's becoming a requirement because Microsoft is going to one day say "you can only run apps installed from the Windows Store, because everything else is insecure" and lock down the software market. Valve knows this which is why they're going so hard on the Steam Deck and Linux.

Non-AMP link: https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/31/linus_torvalds_ftpm/

I always just kill my TPM chip. It's so obvious tpm will be used in the future for application offline DRM. They will executed encrypted operations under the TPM veil and decompilers will become unusable.

I love how Torvalds always calls it like he sees it.

Would love this. I'm still getting the ftpm stutters and there's no way to disable it in my motherboards bios.

Based linus. Kill it, it's pointless

I've had a weird system-wide stutter for months and the usual googling and troubleshooting didn't help.. omg. This might be it. Thank you Linus and thank you op.

the module can cause intermittent stuttering, depending on which Ryzen processor you're using. It appeared when the fTPM was in use, it would access its flash storage via a serial interface, and when doing so, held up activity by the rest of the system.

"Maybe use it for the boot-time 'gather entropy from different sources,' but clearly it should not be used at runtime."

Good idea. Ask it during boot/insmod for some hardware-random bits to seed Linux's usual software-only CSPRNG, then just use that.

And even that might not be a great idea. I wouldn't be surprised if the fTPM RNG is subtly not-entirely-random, at some alphabet agency's behest. I remember there being a controversy over rdrand for this reason…

Yup. I've been wondering if that was the thing that's made the v6.4 kernels so unstable on Ryzen machines.