On Mon, 13 Oct 2025 at 12:47, Daniel P. BerrangĂ© <[email protected]> wrote:
> With a very minimal wording tweak our current defined policy could
> avoid being a blocker for enabling KVM in imx8mp-evk. In
>
>   https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/system/security.html
>
> where it describes the "virtualization use case", we could simply
> tweak it to always require a versioned machine type
>
> Change
>
>   "These use cases rely on hardware virtualization extensions
>    to execute guest code safely on the physical CPU at close-
>    to-native speed."
>
> To say
>
>   "These use cases apply to versioned machine types when used
>    in combination with hardware virtualization extensions
>    to execute guest code safely on the physical CPU at close-
>    to-native speed"

With the suggested changes listed elsewhere in this
thread, my current manually curated list of machines is:

aarch64
  ``virt``
i386, x86_64
  ``microvm``, ``xenfv``, ``xenpv``, ``xenpvh``, ``pc``, ``q35``
s390x
  ``s390-ccw-virtio``
loongarch64:
  ``virt``
ppc64:
  ``pseries``
riscv32, riscv64:
  ``virt``

If we say "versioned machine type", that puts these machines
outside the "supported" boundary:

i386, x86_64
  ``microvm``, ``xenfv``, ``xenpv``, ``xenpvh``
loongarch64:
  ``virt``
riscv32, riscv64:
  ``virt``

I can certainly see the argument for loongarch64
and maybe even riscv[*] still being "not supported for
production security-boundary stuff", but do we really
want to say that the Xen machine types and microvm
aren't suitable for VM use ?

[*] Could somebody from riscv or loongarch maintainers
say whether they think these machines should be on the
"security supported" list or not yet ?

thanks
-- PMM

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