KVM For Linux 4.16 Brings AMD SEV, Exposing More AVX-512 Features To Guests

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) updates have finally been submitted for the Linux 4.16 kernel, which were delayed due to an illness by the subsystem's maintainer.

Of excitement for the Linux 4.16 KVM changes are AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) now being supported by the KVM hypervisor code. The Linux kernel previously received the necessary changes for Secure Encrypted Virtualization and Secure Memory Encryption while now it's fully wired up for allowing this feature on KVM guests. AMD SEV is supported by EPYC and Ryzen Pro processors for encrypting the memory of guests.

The KVM pull also has the UMIP changes that were rejected from the Linux 4.15 kernel merge window.

Other x86 KVM work includes allowing guests to see TOPOEXT / GFNI / VAES / VPCLMULQDQ instruction set extensions as well as more AVX-512 features.

For other architectures there are some optimizations on the ARM front, MMIO emulation for vector loads/stores for PowerPC, memory management cleanups for s390, and a variety of other improvements.

The complete change-log can be found here.