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Fed-up Torvalds suggests disabling AMD’s 'stupid' performance-killing fTPM RNG
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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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.
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This is why I keep my initrd tattooed as a barcode on my testicles.
"Please teabag the web cam to boot."
There's two types of users, those who write a detailed precise technical answer to the subject, and then there's you
You know, I've been thinking about what I want my first tattoo to be for months, you've just given me a great idea
Kernel upgrades are very... Painful.
I don't know why I keep hearing of security measures to stop someone sleuthing into bootloaders.
Am I the only person using Linux who isn't James Bond?
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so you never caught a team of government officials in your living room brute forcing your bootloader at 4am as you got up to use the bathroom, huh. Lucky guy.
I’m an engineer with trade secrets on his laptop. I’ve heard of dozens of people getting laptops stolen from their cars that they left for like ten or fifteen minutes.
The chances are slims, but if it happens I’m in deep trouble whether those secrets leak of not. I’m not taking the risk. I’m encrypting my disk.
It’s not like there’s a difference in performance nowadays.
TPM bad, put your secrets on a proper encryption peripheral, like a smartcard running javacardOS
TPM will turn into cpu-bound DRM, the more you use it, the more this cancer will grow
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You are only seeing what TPM is now. Not what TPM will become when it become an entire encrypted computing processor capable of executing any code while inspection is impossible.
Imagine denuvo running at ring level -1
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Support for old software is now the only reason to use windows.
I'm a big fan of Linux, but I can't believe you really think this.
I legitimately have not booted into windows for years.
Sadly, I agree. I'm at the point now where as long as I'm not trying to game I can thrive on Linux. But even then I spend way more time than necessary getting things to work that do so out of the box on Windows. We have a long way to go before legacy apps is the only reason to run it.
Personally I found the time I saved from not having any control over my system has more than made up for tinkering that I have to do to get things running. My laptop would regularly become unusable for 20+ minutes on windows because of disk performance issues, and I as the user had no means to prevent windows from running the service that locked everything up. That along with other times windows just decides your use case is less important have added up to far more time then having to debug a game here and there
Ungh, yeah I used to have that problem with my laptop when I was in college.
I only booted it up for classes unless I had a test coming up I needed to study for or something. Because why the fuck would I not do that - I had a regular computer at home for everything else.
Every couple weeks, that meant it was updating instead of being available for note taking, and usually for the entire hour I needed it. Because apparently setting the updates to run during shutdown wasn’t good enough, they needed to be run on boot, because fuck you that’s why.
Linux is just.. hey I should probably update this shit at some point… meh, tomorrow.
https://hothardware.com/news/steam-deck-tpm-support-install-windows-11
I mean I generally agree with you, but the SteamDeck runs on an AMD processor with a fTPM that Valve slowly added support for.
It seems unlikely Valve will ever make Windows the primary OS for their devices. And they'd lose a lot of user support if they ever required the TPM for their own software, so hopefully they wouldn't risk it.
Why does everybody seem to think that userspace attestation is the only use for the TPM? The primary use is for data to be encrypted at rest but decrypted at boot as long as certain flags aren't tripped. TPM is great for the security of your data if you know how to set it up.
Valve is never going to require TPM attestation to use Steam, that's just silly. Anti-cheat companies might, but my suggestion there is to just not play games that bundle malware.
Whatever is touted as the primary use doesn't matter as much as what anti-user features it enables.
Anti-user features which are enabled by games and programs that were already anti-user before this. Hardly worth getting upset about, nothing has really changed. You already should have been avoiding them, because they were already anti-user.
I like to think that Valve knows better than to try that.
We use the TPM pretty extensively with no Windows in the environment.
But with a reason, I'm sure. There's no reason for the everyday consumer to need one, other than Microsoft wanting more control.
Data encryption and decryption without entering a password is a pretty darn good reason.
TPM actually provides some useful components to isolate encryption outside of Ring 0, which is a trust win. But any technology must be weighted against its power to oppress.
You do realize that he is talking about a RNG gen and not the TPM?
It is talking about the RNG built into the fTPM.
TPM is pretty important in any modern OS.
Sure you don’t need it. But it’s not 2013. It should be standard along with FDE