Wednesday, January 9, 2019

AMD SEV on RHEL8

Reviewed RHELPLAN-10950. Ongoing discussion with Laszlo Ersek on the shared use of a SEV system. He worked on RHEL 7.6, so had to build his own kernel. We agree I need to get familiar with his SEV tests and decide what is demoable.

Code reviews

Kept going on learning how XSAVE works.

Downloaded the all-in-one Intel Software developer's manual. So far, I was using individual volumes, and was not finding it very convenient. The all-in-one is a massive PDF file (23+MB), but it's much easier to search.

Read section 13.4 of Vol 1. I can't find anything in there that makes a difference for user space. So it means that Paoolo's comment about "supervisor states" may not be related to a specific behavior of XSAVE but rather to QEMU. I'll ask.

Reviewed old patches about SEV in order to get a better feel of how things work inside.

Documentation review

Jiri Herrmann pinged me again about reviewing the documentation for chapter 4 of the RHEL8 doc.

Reviewed the changes, found a small issue with BLS, added the corresponding wording, submitted merge request 143.

Cat incident

During 1x1 with Karen, the cat threw up on my keyboard, while watching the IRC #france window where a discussion on food preferences was flaring. I suspect that my cat was disgusted by some of the arguments being presented

System sharing

Karen suggested an interesting way to share systems, splitting them by OS release to be more efficient and re-image them less often.

Private comments on the blog

Discussion on my daily blog. One of the problems is to make everything public, or "show too much of how the sausage is made". Some of the parts should be private, but for my own use, it is not very practical to have multiple blogs.

I got completely side-tracked looking at various ways to protect part of this blog, and experimenting with the BlogMacs setup to achieve that objective. As a result...

DevConf.cz Presentations

Still not making nearly as much progress as I'd like