| ...Apple is one vendor who I gather does include a TPM chip on their
| systems, I gather, but that wasn't useful for me.
Apple included TPM chips on their first round of Intel-based Macs.
Back in 2005, there were all sorts of stories floating around the net
about how Apple would use TPM to prevent OS X running on non-Apple
hardware.
In fact:
- Some Apple models contain a TPM module (the Infineon TPM1.2);
some (second generation) don't;
- No current Apple model contains an EFI (boot) driver for the
module;
- No current version of OS X contains a driver to access the
module for any purpose;
- Hence: OS X doesn't rely on TPM to block execution on non-
Apple hardware. In fact, there is an active hacker's
community that gets OS X to run on "hackintosh's" -
an announcement of OS X on a Sony Vaio made the
rounds just a couple of days ago. Apparently the
only real difficulty is writing appropriate boot
and other low-level drivers.
Amit Singh, the author of the definitive reference on OS X internals,
has written and distributed an OS X driver for the TPM on those
machines that have it. For all kinds of details, see his page at:
http://www.osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter10/tpm/
-- Jerry
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