At least some s390 cpu models support "Protected Virtualization" (PV),
a mechanism to protect guests from eavesdropping by a compromised
hypervisor.
This is similar in function to other mechanisms like AMD's SEV and
POWER's PEF, which are controlled by the "confidential-guest-support"
machine option. s390 is a slightly special case, because we already
supported PV, simply by using a CPU model with the required feature
(S390_FEAT_UNPACK).
To integrate this with the option used by other platforms, we
implement the following compromise:
- When the confidential-guest-support option is set, s390 will
recognize it, verify that the CPU can support PV (failing if not)
and set virtio default options necessary for encrypted or protected
guests, as on other platforms. i.e. if confidential-guest-support
is set, we will either create a guest capable of entering PV mode,
or fail outright.
- If confidential-guest-support is not set, guests might still be
able to enter PV mode, if the CPU has the right model. This may be
a little surprising, but shouldn't actually be harmful.
To start a guest supporting Protected Virtualization using the new
option use the command line arguments:
-object s390-pv-guest,id=pv0 -machine confidential-guest-support=pv0
Signed-off-by: David Gibson <david@gibson.dropbear.id.au>
Tested-by: Christian Borntraeger <borntraeger@de.ibm.com>
Reviewed-by: Christian Borntraeger <borntraeger@de.ibm.com>
Some upcoming POWER machines have a system called PEF (Protected
Execution Facility) which uses a small ultravisor to allow guests to
run in a way that they can't be eavesdropped by the hypervisor. The
effect is roughly similar to AMD SEV, although the mechanisms are
quite different.
Most of the work of this is done between the guest, KVM and the
ultravisor, with little need for involvement by qemu. However qemu
does need to tell KVM to allow secure VMs.
Because the availability of secure mode is a guest visible difference
which depends on having the right hardware and firmware, we don't
enable this by default. In order to run a secure guest you need to
create a "pef-guest" object and set the confidential-guest-support
property to point to it.
Note that this just *allows* secure guests, the architecture of PEF is
such that the guest still needs to talk to the ultravisor to enter
secure mode. Qemu has no direct way of knowing if the guest is in
secure mode, and certainly can't know until well after machine
creation time.
To start a PEF-capable guest, use the command line options:
-object pef-guest,id=pef0 -machine confidential-guest-support=pef0
Signed-off-by: David Gibson <david@gibson.dropbear.id.au>
Reviewed-by: Greg Kurz <groug@kaod.org>
Now that we've implemented a generic machine option for configuring various
confidential guest support mechanisms:
1. Update docs/amd-memory-encryption.txt to reference this rather than
the earlier SEV specific option
2. Add a docs/confidential-guest-support.txt to cover the generalities of
the confidential guest support scheme
Signed-off-by: David Gibson <david@gibson.dropbear.id.au>
Reviewed-by: Greg Kurz <groug@kaod.org>
