Re: [PATCH 1/1] tpm: disable hwrng for fTPM on some AMD designs

[Limonciello, Mario]

On 7/28/2023 4:38 PM, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Fri, 28 Jul 2023 at 14:01, Limonciello, Mario
> <mario.limonciello@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> > That's exactly why I was asking in the kernel bugzilla if something
> > similar gets tripped up by RDRAND.
>
> So that would sound very unlikely, but who knows... Microcode can
> obviously do pretty much anything at all, but at least the original
> fTPM issues _seemed_ to be about BIOS doing truly crazy things like
> SPI flash accesses.
>
> I can easily imagine a BIOS fTPM code using some absolutely horrid
> global "EFI synchronization" lock or whatever, which could then cause
> random problems just based on some entirely unrelated activity.
>
> I would not be surprised, for example, if wasn't the fTPM hwrnd code
> itself that decided to read some random number from SPI, but that it
> simply got serialized with something else that the BIOS was involved
> with. It's not like BIOS people are famous for their scalable code
> that is entirely parallel...
>
> And I'd be _very_ surprised if CPU microcode does anything even
> remotely like that. Not impossible - HP famously screwed with the time
> stamp counter with SMIs, and I could imagine them - or others - doing
> the same with rdrand.
>
> But it does sound pretty damn unlikely, compared to "EFI BIOS uses a
> one big lock approach".
>
> So rdrand (and rdseed in particular) can be rather slow, but I think
> we're talking hundreds of CPU cycles (maybe low thousands). Nothing
> like the stuttering reports we've seen from fTPM.
>
>                              Linus

Your theory sounds totally plausible and it would explain why even 
though this system has the fixes from the original issue it's tripping a 
similar behavior.

Based on the argument of RDRAND being on the same SOC I think it's a 
pretty good argument to drop contributing to the hwrng entropy 
*anything* that's not a dTPM.