[svsm-devel] Call for mentors/ideas for Google Summer of Code

[Jörg Rödel]

Hi Stefano,

On Fri, Mar 21, 2025 at 10:28:19AM +0100, Stefano Garzarella wrote:
> Another thing I was thinking about is that we should provide an
> environment for students to use to test/develop the feature.
> 
> As long as they can use their laptop, fine, but if special HW is
> required, it might be a problem to give them access.
> 
> Thanks to Gerd's work, IIUC, native platform support in QEMU could
> help us test anything in SVSM that doesn't require interaction with
> guest OS or depend on SEV-SNP/TDX capabilities.

Yes, some projects can be worked on without expensive server hardware,
but others not. The observability project is an example which requires
EPYC hardware.

I can ask for some funding via the CCC for that or maybe one of the
hardware vendors is willing to give us access to a machine. Let me ask
around.

> Yep, I agree. About my previous point, can this project be done
> without SEV-SNP machine?

Yes, I think the CPUID handling can be done with the native platform
support.

> IIUC this requires a SEV-SNP machine, can someone provide access to it
> to a student?

Right, as mentioned above, I will ask around and see if we can get this
funded.

> This should not require SEV-SNP machine, and we also have Oliver PR in
> a good shape to be used as base.
> We also have a PoC working with a very minimal FS+encryption, but at
> least can be used by the student to understand the final scenario.
> In addition, we have OpenVMM to take inspiration from and perhaps
> reuse some code.
> 
> That said, this is in my ToDo list (after the vTPM driver saga...) so
> I don't know whether it makes sense to wait until September to get a
> result from a student or to work on it directly.

This should probably be split up anyways, in a task for the file storage
layer and one for the encryption layer. Since you are planning to work
on these topics in the near future maybe you can scope out some parts as
suitable projects for students?

Regards,

-- 
Jörg Rödel
jroedel at suse.de

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