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diff --git a/Documentation/security/tpm/tpm_vtpm_proxy.rst b/Documentation/security/tpm/tpm_vtpm_proxy.rst new file mode 100644 index 000000000..ea08e76b1 --- /dev/null +++ b/Documentation/security/tpm/tpm_vtpm_proxy.rst @@ -0,0 +1,50 @@ +============================================= +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 |