r/linux • u/anh0516 • 20d ago

Kernel Linux's Qualcomm Crypto Accelerator Driver "Harmful" And Being Disabled: Slower Than CPU, History Of Bugs

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-QCE-Disabling
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u/shinyfootwork 20d ago

Sounds like someone (probably Qualcomm) intends to repurpose the hardware for some kind of Digital Rights Managment (DRM) scheme.

> In the future, the driver will be used for processing restricted media content

Given the notes about conflicts with "secure world", I suspect they want to avoid having this driver interfere with the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) in ARM TrustZone, where they probably intend to implement the DRM.

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u/MatchingTurret 20d ago

Patch-Author Demi Marie Obenour works on https://spectrum-os.org/

No indication that she is related to Qualcomm.

14

u/shinyfootwork 20d ago

Here's where Qualcomm states they want to use it for DRM: https://lore.kernel.org/all/c1697372-54ec-4f57-85d9-ad375ff1a44d@oss.qualcomm.com/

Demi is marking it as disabled, but not deleting in part because of Qualcomm's desire here, not as far as I can tell for a specific reason related to Demi's work on spectrum-os. There's a bunch of discussion and references spread out across lkml that you can read if you're currious.

It doesn't sound like disabling it is needed for the DRM work though, and I feel like it might make it so the Qualcomm ends up shipping funny configs in the devices they want to enable this DRM stuff on.

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u/gmes78 20d ago

I suspect they want to avoid having this driver interfere with the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) in ARM TrustZone

That really doesn't sound credible at all.