Re: [PATCH 0/4] tpm: lazy flush for the session null key

[Jarkko Sakkinen]

On Sun Sep 15, 2024 at 9:04 PM EEST, Jarkko Sakkinen wrote:
> There is no load and flush the null key for every transaction. It only
> needs to be flushed when user space accesses TPM. This postpones the
> flush up to that point.
>
> The goal is to take the first step addressing [1]. Other performance
> improvements are needed too but this is the most obvious one and
> easiest to address.
>
> [1] https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=219229
>
> Jarkko Sakkinen (4):
>   tpm: remove file header documentation from tpm2-sessions.c
>   tpm: address tpm2_create_null_primary() return value
>   tpm: address tpm2_create_primary() failure
>   tpm: flush the session null key only when required
>
>  drivers/char/tpm/tpm-chip.c       |  13 ++++
>  drivers/char/tpm/tpm-dev-common.c |   7 ++
>  drivers/char/tpm/tpm-interface.c  |   9 ++-
>  drivers/char/tpm/tpm2-cmd.c       |   3 +
>  drivers/char/tpm/tpm2-sessions.c  | 115 ++++++++++--------------------
>  include/linux/tpm.h               |   2 +
>  6 files changed, 68 insertions(+), 81 deletions(-)

I did not take any benchmarks yet but I did run this through
run-tests.sh in [1] to make sure that it does not break anything.

Looking at pseude-code of ContextSave from [2] fixing this is
orthogonal from any possible context gap issues as null key
is just plain transient object.

I would fix the obvious first and then look what can be done
to sessions (e.g. global LRU tracking of sessions or similar
approach). I don't expect over the top performance improvement
with this patch set.

[1] https://codeberg.org/jarkko/linux-tpmdd-test
[2] https://trustedcomputinggroup.org/wp-content/uploads/TPM-2.0-1.83-Part-3-Commands-Code.pdf

BR, Jarkko