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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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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.
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.