On 28.01.22 16:47, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
Dear QEMU, KVM, and rust-vmm communities,
QEMU will apply for Google Summer of Code 2022
(https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/) and has been accepted into
Outreachy May-August 2022 (https://www.outreachy.org/). You can now
submit internship project ideas for QEMU, KVM, and rust-vmm!
If you have experience contributing to QEMU, KVM, or rust-vmm you can
be a mentor. It's a great way to give back and you get to work with
people who are just starting out in open source.
Please reply to this email by February 21st with your project ideas.
Good project ideas are suitable for remote work by a competent
programmer who is not yet familiar with the codebase. In
addition, they are:
- Well-defined - the scope is clear
- Self-contained - there are few dependencies
- Uncontroversial - they are acceptable to the community
- Incremental - they produce deliverables along the way
Feel free to post ideas even if you are unable to mentor the project.
It doesn't hurt to share the idea!
I have one that I'd absolutely *love* to see but not gotten around
implementing myself yet :)
Summary:
Implement -M nitro-enclave in QEMU
Nitro Enclaves are the first widely adopted implementation of hypervisor
assisted compute isolation. Similar to technologies like SGX, it allows
to spawn a separate context that is inaccessible by the parent Operating
System. This is implemented by "giving up" resources of the parent VM
(CPU cores, memory) to the hypervisor which then spawns a second vmm to
execute a completely separate virtual machine. That new VM only has a
vsock communication channel to the parent and has a built-in lightweight
TPM.
One big challenge with Nitro Enclaves is that due to its roots in
security, there are very few debugging / introspection capabilities.
That makes OS bringup, debugging and bootstrapping very difficult.
Having a local dev&test environment that looks like an Enclave, but is
100% controlled by the developer and introspectable would make life a
lot easier for everyone working on them. It also may pave the way to see
Nitro Enclaves adopted in VM environments outside of EC2.
This project will consist of adding a new machine model to QEMU that
mimics a Nitro Enclave environment, including the lightweight TPM, the
vsock communication channel and building firmware which loads the
special "EIF" file format which contains kernel, initramfs and metadata
from a -kernel image.
Links:
https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/nitro/nitro-enclaves/
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20200921121732.44291-10-andraprs@amazon.com/T/
Details:
Skill level: intermediate - advanced (some understanding of QEMU machine
modeling would be good)
Language: C
Mentor: Maybe me (Alexander Graf), depends on timelines and holiday
season. Let's find an intern first - I promise to find a mentor then :)
Suggested by: Alexander Graf
Note: I don't know enough about rust-vmm's debugging capabilities. If it
has gdbstub and a local UART that's easily usable, the project might be
perfectly viable under its umbrella as well - written in Rust then of
course.