The check for whether the swtpm binary was modified is checking pointers to the mtime field in two distinct structs, so will always compare different. This resulted in re-probing swtpm capabilities every time, as many as 20 times for a single VM launch. Fixes: commit 01cf7a1bb9f1da27ad8bcbaa82c4f7a948c6a793 Author: Stefan Berger <stefanb(a)us.ibm.com&gt; Date: Thu Jul 25 14:22:04 2019 -0400 tpm: Check whether previously found executables were updated Signed-off-by: Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange(a)redhat.com&gt; --- src/util/virtpm.c | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/src/util/virtpm.c b/src/util/virtpm.c index 8a77ba98ff..ffec23a535 100644 --- a/src/util/virtpm.c +++ b/src/util/virtpm.c @@ -301,7 +301,7 @@ virTPMEmulatorInit(void) findit = true; if (!findit && - &statbuf.st_mtime != &prgs[i].stat->st_mtime) + statbuf.st_mtime != prgs[i].stat->st_mtime) findit = true; }