[svsm-devel] Potential project on implementing AMD SEV emulation in QEMU

[Stefano Garzarella]

On Tue, Apr 22, 2025 at 08:52:49AM +0100, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
>On Thu, Apr 17, 2025 at 05:26:15PM +0200, Stefano Garzarella wrote:
>> Hi Tom,
>> yesterday in the Coconut-SVSM community call we talked about a
>> potential project with the University of Pisa to emulate AMD
>> SEV/SEV-ES/SEV-SNP support in QEMU.
>>
>> Joerg rightly suggested having a step-by-step approach, supporting SEV
>> initially, as supporting SEV-SNP directly might be too much for a
>> master's thesis (about 6 months of work).
>
>Agreed, from the QEMU maintainer side we'd very likely want to see an
>incremental set of patches rather than a "big bang" attempting todo
>everything in one go. Staging patch submissions for SEV, then ES
>then SNP would make conceptual sense, to enable something useful to
>be delivered at each step.

I see, thanks for confirming!

>
>> We wondered if you knew of any attempts already made in this regard,
>> but especially if you think it's a feasible thing.
>
>I think 6 months is possibly on the optimistic side.
>
>Non-trivial feature proposals have a habit of taking longer than people
>expect upfront. They might get lucky, but I equally it wouldn't surprise
>me to see patches go through 6-9 months of reviews, on top of the initial
>time needed to write a first impl before submission, with multiple
>repostings needed before being merged. IOW it could be 6 months,  it
>could be 12 months.

Yes, I understand what you mean and I will point it out. Anyway, as with 
GSoC as well, IMHO the time of the thesis, it doesn't have to be 
perfectly aligned with the time it takes to merge everything upstream.
Obviously I will make sure that this will be the ultimate goal.

Eventually, if by the university the thesis is ready and the student has 
other priorities, we can help with the process for upstreaming, as we 
have sometimes done for GSoC projects.

>
>I don't mean that to discourage an attempt. Just that non-trivial open
>source contributions with fixed timelines are not a reliable combination.
>IOW, plan for what happens if it takes longer than expected, exceeding
>the 6 month thesis timeframe.

I agree, I will point it out!

Thank you so much for your valuable feedback!
Stefano