Re: [PATCH v2 1/6] hwrng: core: Freeze khwrng thread during suspend
From: Jarkko Sakkinen
Date: Fri Aug 16 2019 - 19:55:44 EST
On Fri, Aug 16, 2019 at 05:56:12PM +0200, Alexander Steffen wrote:
> > Andrey talked to me a little about this today. Andrey would prefer we
> > don't just let the TPM go into a wonky state if it's used during
> > suspend/resume so that it can stay resilient to errors. Sounds OK to me,
> > but my point still stands that we need to fix the callers.
> >
> > I'll resurrect the IS_SUSPENDED flag and make it set generically by the
> > tpm_pm_suspend() and tpm_pm_resume() functions and then spit out a big
> > WARN_ON() and return an error value like -EAGAIN if the TPM functions
> > are called when the TPM is suspended. I hope we don't hit the warning
> > message, but if we do then at least we can track it down rather quickly
> > and figure out how to fix the caller instead of just silently returning
> > -EAGAIN and hoping for that to be visible to the user.
>
> There is another use case I see for this functionality: There are ways for
> user space to upgrade the TPM's firmware via /dev/tpm0 (using e.g.
> TPM2_FieldUpgradeStart/TPM2_FieldUpgradeData). While upgrading, the normal
> TPM functionality might not be available (commands return TPM_RC_UPGRADE or
> other error codes). Even after the upgrade is finished, the TPM might
> continue to refuse command execution (e.g. with TPM_RC_REBOOT).
>
> I'm not sure whether all in-kernel users are prepared to deal correctly with
> those error codes. But even if they are, it might be better to block them
> from sending commands in the first place, to not interfere with the upgrade
> process.
>
> What would you think about a way for a user space upgrade tool to also set
> this flag, to make the TPM unavailable for everything but the upgrade
> process?
>
> Alexander
NOTE: Just commenting the FW use case.
I don't like it because it contains variable amount of reserved time
for a hardware resource.
Right now a user thread gets a lease of one TPM command for /dev/tpm0
and that is how I would like to keep it.
/Jarkko