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@raja-grewal
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This pull request enables SME and SEV in supported AMD processors.

As per discussed in #338 and #341.

This has also been suggested by me and approved in secureblue/secureblue#1631.

Changes

Sets the following kernel boot parameters:

mem_encrypt=on
kvm_amd.sev=1
vm_amd.sev_es=1
vm_amd.sev_snp=1

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@ArrayBolt3
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This is a bit scary to me. While it does appear that the only really affected devices are Raven Ridge APUs (since they require the IOMMU to be in passthrough mode), there are very likely users still using hardware from 2018 with Kicksecure in the wild, so I don't think we can easily discount the number of users this could affect (especially since so many of them showed up in 2021 at https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=994453 when Debian got AMD SME enabled by default). As that bug report shows, the results of this can range anywhere from "framebuffer driver used instead of amdgpu" to "early boot kernel panic, system becomes impossible to use and one can't even see the panic message". If we enable this, it will affect all kernels, so a user who doesn't know what they're doing can't simply boot into an older kernel to recover. They have to know that AMD SME is the problem and disable it in the GRUB command line, which most users probably won't know and will have a hard time figuring out on their own.

If there was a way for us to detect at runtime whether a Raven Ridge GPU was in use or not, and enable this option if not, I would be a lot more comfortable with this. That would require some facility to detect extra hardening measures that the running system supports though, which we don't really have yet. @adrelanos Maybe that would be something we could add?

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2 participants