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.
AMD's fTPM Issues Have A Long History, Emerging With The Release of Windows 11
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 ends up working in the future, there are alternatives that aren't any worse.
While the statement by Linux's creator does express his resentment towards the issue, he also mentioned motherboard BIOS coders, weighing factors for CPU-based RDRAND and fTPM-based HWRND. We expect fixes for the identified issues to get released in the future, but the whole "fTPM' saga is disappointing and by the looks of it, it isn't over yet.
News Source: Phoronix
About the author: Muhammad Zuhair is a hardware and technology reporter for Wccftech, specializing in the semiconductor industry and the complex interplay between technology, manufacturing, and geopolitics. His coverage focuses on the corporate strategies and technological roadmaps of industry giants like TSMC, NVIDIA, Samsung, and Intel. Zuhair's expertise lies in deconstructing complex topics such as fabrication nodes (e.g., 2nm process), the economic impact of policies like the CHIPS Act, and the strategic development of AI infrastructure from NVIDIA, AMD and Intel.
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