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authorDaniel Baumann <daniel.baumann@progress-linux.org>2024-04-27 10:05:51 +0000
committerDaniel Baumann <daniel.baumann@progress-linux.org>2024-04-27 10:05:51 +0000
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+=============================================
+Virtual TPM Proxy Driver for Linux Containers
+=============================================
+
+| Authors:
+| Stefan Berger <stefanb@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
+
+This document describes the virtual Trusted Platform Module (vTPM)
+proxy device driver for Linux containers.
+
+Introduction
+============
+
+The goal of this work is to provide TPM functionality to each Linux
+container. This allows programs to interact with a TPM in a container
+the same way they interact with a TPM on the physical system. Each
+container gets its own unique, emulated, software TPM.
+
+Design
+======
+
+To make an emulated software TPM available to each container, the container
+management stack needs to create a device pair consisting of a client TPM
+character device ``/dev/tpmX`` (with X=0,1,2...) and a 'server side' file
+descriptor. The former is moved into the container by creating a character
+device with the appropriate major and minor numbers while the file descriptor
+is passed to the TPM emulator. Software inside the container can then send
+TPM commands using the character device and the emulator will receive the
+commands via the file descriptor and use it for sending back responses.
+
+To support this, the virtual TPM proxy driver provides a device ``/dev/vtpmx``
+that is used to create device pairs using an ioctl. The ioctl takes as
+an input flags for configuring the device. The flags for example indicate
+whether TPM 1.2 or TPM 2 functionality is supported by the TPM emulator.
+The result of the ioctl are the file descriptor for the 'server side'
+as well as the major and minor numbers of the character device that was created.
+Besides that the number of the TPM character device is returned. If for
+example ``/dev/tpm10`` was created, the number (``dev_num``) 10 is returned.
+
+Once the device has been created, the driver will immediately try to talk
+to the TPM. All commands from the driver can be read from the file descriptor
+returned by the ioctl. The commands should be responded to immediately.
+
+UAPI
+====
+
+.. kernel-doc:: include/uapi/linux/vtpm_proxy.h
+
+.. kernel-doc:: drivers/char/tpm/tpm_vtpm_proxy.c
+ :functions: vtpmx_ioc_new_dev