[kata-dev] Kata with AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV)

Ricardo Aravena raravena80 at gmail.com
Fri Feb 23 16:31:56 UTC 2018


On Fri, Feb 23, 2018 at 5:55 AM, Tao Peng <bergwolf at hyper.sh> wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 23, 2018 at 12:32 AM, Larrew, Jesse <Jesse.Larrew at amd.com>
> wrote:
> > Ah! Yes, live migration of encrypted guests is supported by the
> hardware. Qemu support is still being actively developed though. The
> details of migrating encrypted VMs are discussed in our Secure Encrypted
> Virtualization API [1]. Basically, the AMD Secure Processor re-encrypts and
> integrity-protects the guest memory into discrete "packets" that can be
> sent to the destination machine. The transport/integrity keys used for
> migration are ephemeral keys negotiated with the receiving machine using a
> Diffie-Hellman exchange.
> >
> > Live migration is useful for VMs that need to be stateful. However, my
> impression of container use cases is that they are encouraged to be
> stateless. For stateless containers, it would most likely be quicker to
> simply throw away the container and start a new one on the destination
> machine. Do you have specific use cases that require the ability to migrate
> containers?
> >
> Yes. We have an optimization [1] based on the qemu live migration
> feature which let us share the initial part of guest memory among
> guests on the same host. It's a quite useful feature for vm-based
> container workload because the kernel and initramfs are most likely
> the same for all guests on the host.
>

My two cents here:

It's also quite useful at a higher level when you are dealing with stateful
services, that are not heavily containerized in prod yet. First ones that
pop in my head are redis/memchached. Then there's also big data stateful
type of dbs that require a lot memory, say Cassandra, or Scylla.



>
> [1]: https://github.com/hyperhq/qemu/commit/162b05b38ddb8505c209cf3c570d70
> c76427c8a5
>
> Cheers,
> Tao
>
> > [1] Secure Encrypted Virtualization API v0.16:
> > https://support.amd.com/TechDocs/55766_SEV-KM%20API_Specification.pdf
> >
> > Sincerely,
> > Jesse
> >
> >> -----Original Message-----
> >> From: Tao Peng [mailto:bergwolf at hyper.sh]
> >> Sent: Thursday, February 22, 2018 5:15 AM
> >> To: Larrew, Jesse <Jesse.Larrew at amd.com>
> >> Cc: kata-dev at lists.katacontainers.io; Hollingsworth, Brent
> >> <brent.hollingsworth at amd.com>; Kaplan, David <David.Kaplan at amd.com>;
> >> Woller, Thomas <thomas.woller at amd.com>
> >> Subject: Re: [kata-dev] Kata with AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization
> (SEV)
> >>
> >> Hi Larrew,
> >>
> >> > I’m not familiar with qemu VM clone. Is there any documentation or
> source
> >> files I could browse to learn more?
> >> >
> >> Sorry I meant to say live migration instead of clone since qemu clone is
> >> mostly used to mean guest image cloning. Here is some background I can
> find
> >> online:
> >> https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2015/03/24/live-migrating-qemu-kvm-
> >> virtual-machines/
> >>
> >> Cheers,
> >> Tao
> >> --
> >> bergwolf at hyper.sh
>
>
>
> --
> bergwolf at hyper.sh
>
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