Linux Creator Expresses “Frustration” Towards AMD’s fTPM Bugs, Calls To Disable Feature

wccftech.com:

AMD's fTPM issues are well-known in the industry, often causing system crashes and freezing. Linux's creator Linus Torvalds has expressed his disappointment towards the feature, labeling it a "plague" for the kernel.

For a quick recap, Trusted Platform Module or TPM is a security check which has been made a necessity to be enabled for the latest version of Windows 11. While the intention behind this move is for the consumer's benefit, the feature brought several problems. The main problems that fTPM brought were random stuttering and lagging. Moreover, several users also experienced jittering and disruptions while gaming. While the problem did occur in the Intel platform, most of the issues were on AMD, which still persist today.

AMD did release various fixes to cater to the problem, and to some extent, they were resolved. However, on the Linux kernel, the situation is different. The TPM issue in Linux is also highlighted at Kernel.org Bugzilla, a famous site for identifying bugs on the kernel. Here is what Linus Torvalds had to say about the emerging issues due to fTPM:

Let's just disable the stupid fTPM hwrnd thing.

Maybe use it for the boot-time "gather entropy from different sources", but clearly it should *not* be used at runtime.

Why would anybody use that crud when any machine that has it supposedly fixed (which apparently didn't turn out to be true after all) would also have the CPU rdrand instruction that doesn't have the problem?

If you don't trust the CPU rdrand implementation (and that has had bugs too - see clear_rdrand_cpuid_bit() and x86_init_rdrand()), why would you trust the fTPM version that has caused even *more* problems?

So I don't see any downside to just saying "that fTPM thing is not working". Even if it