Re: [tpmdd-devel] [PATCH 09/13] tpm: Pull everything related tosysfs into tpm-sysfs.c

From: Jason Gunthorpe
Date: Mon Sep 23 2013 - 16:42:46 EST


On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 04:20:51PM -0400, Daniel De Graaf wrote:

> That's fine; it wasn't really advertised in the description, and was
> mostly added in order to demonstrate the locality security label binding
> in Xen's vtpm-stubdom.

Ok, lets take it out for now then? I'll send a patch.

> >It looks like this driver was introduced in the 3.12 merge window, we
> >could drop the attribute, and try to merge a core supported locality
> >API in 3.13? What do you think?
> >
> >But, if you say it is needed, it is easy enough to adjust this patch
> >series.

> If it's replaced with an alternative, I don't think the sysfs attribute
> will need to remain. I am not aware of any clients that currently use
> this attribute. The sysfs attribute could remain as the common interface
> for changing locality, unless you think an ioctl on /dev/tpm0 or
> something else would be preferable (the attribute was just the simplest
> way to implement locality switching at the time).

Off the very top of my head:

I suspect that a good API would be a sysfs attribute
'default_locality' and an IOCTL to change localities. The
default_locality would only take effect when the /dev/tpmX is opened,
so fiddling with sysfs doesn't break active users.

The struct ops I've added would have a function to change localities,
some of the generic TPM functions should be revised to have a locality
argument.

Some thought is needed to determine what locality in-kernel users
should be using. I suspect userspace and kernel space should not be
forced to the same locality.

Should user space be restricted to a subset of localities?

What use models do you see with the security label binding mechanism
you have on the hypervisor side?

Jason
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