Re: [regression] Bug 216989 - since 6.1 systems with AMD Ryzen stutter when fTPM is enabled

[Jarkko Sakkinen <jarkko@kernel.org>]

On Thu, Feb 02, 2023 at 07:57:37AM -0500, James Bottomley wrote:
> On Thu, 2023-02-02 at 11:28 +0100, Linux kernel regression tracking
> (Thorsten Leemhuis) wrote:
> [...]
> > So it's a firmware problem, but apparently one that Linux only
> > triggers since 6.1.
> > 
> > Jason, could the hwrng changes have anything to do with this?
> > 
> > A bisection really would be helpful, but I guess that is not easy as
> > the problem apparently only shows up after some time...
> 
> the problem description says the fTPM causes system stutter when it
> writes to NVRAM.  Since an fTPM is a proprietary implementation, we
> don't know what it does.  The ms TPM implementation definitely doesn't
> trigger NV writes on rng requests, but it is plausible this fTPM does
> ... particularly if they have a time based input to the DRNG.  Even if
> this speculation is true, there's not much we can do about it, since
> it's a firmware bug and AMD should have delivered the BIOS update that
> fixes it.
> 
> The way to test this would be to set the config option
> 
> CONFIG_HW_RANDOM_TPM=n
> 
> and see if the stutter goes away.  I suppose if someone could quantify
> the bad bioses, we could warn, but that's about it.
> 
> James
> 

And e.g. I do not have a Ryzen CPU so pretty hard to answer such question.

BR, Jarkko