TPM is basically never for your benefit. It's becoming a requirement because Microsoft is going to one day say "you can only run apps installed from the Windows Store, because everything else is insecure" and lock down the software market. Valve knows this which is why they're going so hard on the Steam Deck and Linux.
I've had a weird system-wide stutter for months and the usual googling and troubleshooting didn't help.. omg. This might be it. Thank you Linus and thank you op.
the module can cause intermittent stuttering, depending on which Ryzen processor you're using. It appeared when the fTPM was in use, it would access its flash storage via a serial interface, and when doing so, held up activity by the rest of the system.
"Maybe use it for the boot-time 'gather entropy from different sources,' but clearly it should not be used at runtime."
Good idea. Ask it during boot/insmod for some hardware-random bits to seed Linux's usual software-only CSPRNG, then just use that.
And even that might not be a great idea. I wouldn't be surprised if the fTPM RNG is subtly not-entirely-random, at some alphabet agency's behest. I remember there being a controversy over rdrand for this reason…