This part of Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) patch series focuses on KVM
changes required to create and manage SEV guests.
SEV is an extension to the AMD-V architecture which supports running encrypted
virtual machine (VMs) under the control of a hypervisor. Encrypted VMs have their
pages (code and data) secured such that only the guest itself has access to
unencrypted version. Each encrypted VM is associated with a unique encryption key;
if its data is accessed to a different entity using a different key the encrypted
guest's data will be incorrectly decrypted, leading to unintelligible data.
This security model ensures that hypervisor will no longer able to inspect or
alter any guest code or data.
The key management of this feature is handled by a separate processor known as
the AMD Secure Processor (AMD-SP) which is present on AMD SOCs. The SEV Key
Management Specification (see below) provides a set of commands which can be
used by hypervisor to load virtual machine keys through the AMD-SP driver.
The patch series adds a new ioctl in KVM driver (KVM_MEMORY_ENCRYPT_OP). The
ioctl will be used by qemu to issue SEV guest-specific commands defined in Key
Management Specification.
The following links provide additional details:
AMD Memory Encryption white paper:
http://amd-dev.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wordpress/media/2013/12/AMD_Memory_Encryption_Whitepaper_v7-Public.pdf
AMD64 Architecture Programmer's Manual:
http://support.amd.com/TechDocs/24593.pdf
SME is section 7.10
SEV is section 15.34
SEV Key Management:
http://support.amd.com/TechDocs/55766_SEV-KM API_Specification.pdf
KVM Forum Presentation:
http://www.linux-kvm.org/images/7/74/02x08A-Thomas_Lendacky-AMDs_Virtualizatoin_Memory_Encryption_Technology.pdf
SEV Guest BIOS support:
SEV support has been add to EDKII/OVMF BIOS
https://github.com/tianocore/edk2
Signed-off-by: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>