Re: [PATCH v2] tpm: add support for partial reads

[Jarkko Sakkinen]

On Mon, Oct 29, 2018 at 12:52:17PM -0700, Tadeusz Struk wrote:
> Currently to read a response from the TPM device an application needs
> provide big enough buffer for the whole response and read it in one go.
> The application doesn't know how big the response it beforehand so it
> always needs to maintain a 4K buffer and read the max (4K).
> In case if the user of the TSS library doesn't provide big enough
> buffer the TCTI spec says that the library should set the required
> size and return TSS2_TCTI_RC_INSUFFICIENT_BUFFER error code so that the
> application could allocate a bigger buffer and call receive again.
> To make it possible in the TSS library, this requires being able to do
> partial reads from the driver.
> The library would read the 10 bytes header first to get the actual size
> of the response from the header, and then read the rest of the response.
> This patch adds support for partial reads, i.e. the user can read the
> response in one or multiple reads, until the whole response is consumed.
> The user can also read only part of the response and ignore
> the rest by issuing a new write to send a new command.
> 
> The usecase is implemented in this TSS commit:
> https://github.com/tpm2-software/tpm2-tss/commit/ce982f67a67dc08e24683d30b05800648d8a264c
> 
> Signed-off-by: Tadeusz Struk <tadeusz.struk@xxxxxxxxx>
> ---
> Changes in v2:
>  - Allow writes after only partial response is consumed to maintain
>    backwords compatibility.

I do not understand what this bullet means. Do you deny writes somehow?

/Jarkko