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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
The people that prefer Windows for gaming are not the people that will have performance issues on an OS basis, their rig is powerful enough to run complex games, the OS based performance loss is negligible in comparison. Hell, I sometimes don’t reboot the work computer for days and it doesn’t freeze at all. The system is on an SSD and there are no hiccups nor disk performance issues. In any case, with current day prices, buying a new m2 stick and new ram is less than 100€ total, and to be honest, I’d rather pay that and be fine for 4-5 years than spend a big part of my free time trying to make witcher 3, baldur’s gate 3, path of exile, tons of steam games and league working perfectly for Linux. It’s just not worth it.
I use WSL for work because coding in a Linux environment is better but I still need access to office tools, because companies work with those tools.
Linux won the servers war, but it still has to do much to win the home/work computer war.
You do realize that he is talking about a RNG gen and not the TPM?
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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.
This is why I keep my initrd tattooed as a barcode on my testicles.
“Please teabag the web cam to boot.”
Kernel upgrades are very… Painful.
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
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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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
Whoops. Thanks. I corrected the URL in the post.
The wonders of modern technology!
Man, I’m glad Sync for Lemmy launched today, I really missed the automatic amp removal from links.
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.
How do you kill your TPM chip?
Level 1, turn off in bios
Level 2, desolder from motherboard
Level 3, remove cpu pins related to tpm
Level 4, decap cpu, laser off tpm bus or blocks
Level 5, throw computer into a volcano and go live in the woods using no technology more complex than a flint and steel.
Thank you, the best I can do is level 2 (once I learn how to solder)
I love how Torvalds always calls it like he sees it.
insert nvidia middle finger gif here
Inserted
Would love this. I’m still getting the ftpm stutters and there’s no way to disable it in my motherboards bios.
Wow I’m surprised you can’t disable it. I can disable it on my desktop BIOS (Gigabyte X570S Pro AX) and my work laptop BIOS (Dell G15).
You use a Dell G15 for work?
I do, yeah.
What is it that you do?
Website developer, pretty standard job.
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.
Could this be why I get stuttering in games after enabling TPM installing windows 11?
“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/
insmodfor 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
rdrandfor this reason…The fix with any possible issues with rdrand is the same here. When entropy is gathered from many sources including hardware instructions, any nefarious plant in the chip is drowned out in a sea of noise.
I’m no cryptographer, but that seems like an awfully dangerous assumption.
Well, it’s an fTPM, aka software, and AFAIK, no software can truly have a random RNG.
So it might be very good pseudo random at best.
It could be only mostly firmware, with a hardware RNG.
If not, and it uses a CSPRNG, then I don’t see much point in using it at all. Linux already has its own CSPRNG.
Yup. I’ve been wondering if that was the thing that’s made the v6.4 kernels so unstable on Ryzen machines.
good thing my Ryzen 1000 series motherboard doesn’t even have TPM…I need to upgrade lool
Relevant:
😂😂😂
What is that needle with a ball stuck onto it? In the photograph. Someone please help.
Microphone from a headset.
I agree. If it doesn’t work, disable it until it’s fixed
Based linus. Kill it, it’s pointless
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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.
