systemd-tpm2-swtpm.service(8) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON

SYSTEMD-....SERVICE(8)  systemd-tpm2-swtpm.service SYSTEMD-....SERVICE(8)

NAME         top

       systemd-tpm2-swtpm.service, systemd-tpm2-swtpm - Provide a
       fallback software TPM

SYNOPSIS         top

       systemd-tpm2-swtpm.service

       /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-tpm2-swtpm

DESCRIPTION         top

       The systemd-tpm2-swtpm.service provides fallback software TPM
       functionality, intended for use in environments where a discrete
       or firmware TPM ("hardware TPM") is not available. It is pulled
       into the boot process by systemd-tpm2-generator(8) if a hardware
       TPM is not available, and the system is configured to provide a
       software TPM in that case.

       Note that a software TPM provides only very weak security
       properties compared to a hardware TPM, and hence should only be
       used as a fallback mechanism if a hardware TPM is not available
       but TPM semantics are desired. This service ultimately wraps
       swtpm(8).

       If the boot secret /.extra/boot-secret (in the initrd) or
       /run/systemd/stub/boot-secret (on the host) is available the
       software TPM NVRAM storage is encrypted with this key. See
       systemd-stub(7) for details.

       The TPM NVRAM storage is placed on the EFI System Partition as it
       needs to be accessible during very early boot-up, in particular
       before the root file system is decrypted and mounted.

SEE ALSO         top

       systemd(1), systemd-tpm2-generator(8), swtpm(8), systemd-stub(7)

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the systemd (systemd system and service
       manager) project.  Information about the project can be found at
       ⟨http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd⟩.  If you have a
       bug report for this manual page, see
       ⟨http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/#bugreports⟩.
       This page was obtained from the project's upstream Git repository
       ⟨https://github.com/systemd/systemd.git⟩ on 2026-05-24.  (At that
       time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in the
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       (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
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systemd 261~rc1                                    SYSTEMD-....SERVICE(8)

Pages that refer to this page: systemd.directives(7)systemd.index(7)systemd-tpm2-generator(8)