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Fed-up Torvalds suggests disabling AMD’s 'stupid' performance-killing fTPM RNG
(www.theregister.com)
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this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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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.
I doubt they would risk it as well, but the point is that it exists on the SteamDeck and can be utilized.
So what’s your point?
This is the comment I was replying to. I was simply pointing out that for a company "going hard" on SteamDeck and Linux, it's curious that they would spend any amount of effort at all enabling the TPM to allow people to run Windows. I guess my point is I don't think they're "going hard" quite as much as the person I responded to thinks.
Also it was just pointing out that this specifically can affect the SteamDeck since they use an AMD processor with AMD fTPM.
They are "going hard" the way I see it. Without Valve doing legwork behind the scenes and collaborating with anticheat developers we wouldn't even have Apex Legends running on Linux like we've had for a year and a half. They've been talking about wanting to use Linux as a viable PC gaming platform to escape Microsofts lockdown of their platform since the days of Steam Machines when Windows 8 and the new store app were giving bad signs.
Either way Valve would be silly not to provide a compatible way to use Windows on the Deck. Even though the situation is much better these days, they know very well that a lot of enthusiast PC gamers would be dismissive of the Deck if Windows couldn't work properly on it and that word of mouth would bring less confidence in the product.
Does EAC work correctly playing Apex Legends under Linux? If it does I'll download the game tonight.
I don't see how it affects the Steam Deck. It's entirely possible that the Steam Deck supports fTPM purely because it was part of the motherboard template Valve chose and it would have been more trouble to change it than to just leave it in.
so what’s your point?