IBM Posts Initial Patches For Linux Secure Virtual Machine On POWER

IBM developers on Friday posted their initial Linux kernel patches for enabling Secure Virtual Machine (SVM) support with POWER hardware.

These "request for comments" patches are their preliminary work on supporting Secure Virtual Machines on POWER.. The goal is on making the guest's memory inaccessible to the hypervisor, similar to the work done by AMD for EPYC CPUs with Secure Encrypted Virtualization and as well some work by Intel for their CPUs.

The POWER SVM support can currently be tested with QEMU and KVM. The PPC SVM support relies upon an Ultravisor executing below the hypervisor and is available for some of IBM's current POWER platforms.

These RFC patches on this early work for better securing the memory of virtual machines on POWER hardware can be found via the kernel mailing list.