TPM-FAIL VS ms-tpm-20-ref

TPM isn't necessarily a good thing. The user hands over total control to the manufacturer, and if Intel randomly decided to stop supporting Linux on the device you own, you would have no choice but to install Windows. There's also the huge issue of vulnerabilities in several TPM devices that make your computer less secure than without a TPM: most notably ROCA which existed for over 5 years, but also TPM-Fail (several instances of huge timing leakage), Bad Dream (loophole in TPM specification regarding sleep states) and leakage from the LPC bus connecting the TPM to the CPU. Security evaluations of TPMs don't seem to deliver what they promise, making it possible that there are even worse and more widespread weaknesses in currently used devices. Even if it worked as intended, TPM as a concept seems dystopian to me: this well-known controversial article explains some of the dangers.

It depends on how the TPM is being used by the OS and its apps. If it’s purely being used for the crypto key storage and crypto operations, then you can probably use something like the MS reference implementation [0]. If the OS requires attestation and endorsement, there is a manufacturer key pair that is embedded into the chip that you can use to attest and verify that the TPM you are interacting with is indeed from a particular manufacturer. That aspect would not be doable for an emulated DIY TPM.

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/ms-tpm-20-ref