This guide is designed for developers and is - same as the Developer Guide - not intended for production systems or end users. It is advisable to only follow this guide on non-critical development systems.
To run Kata Containers in SNP-VMs, the following software stack is used.
The host BIOS and kernel must be capable of supporting AMD SEV-SNP and configured accordingly. For Kata Containers, the host kernel with branch sev-snp-iommu-avic_5.19-rc6_v3
and commit 3a88547
is known to work in conjunction with SEV Firmware version 1.51.3 (0xh_1.33.03) available on AMD's SEV developer website. See AMD's guide to configure the host accordingly. Verify that you are able to run SEV-SNP encrypted VMs first. The guest components required for Kata Containers are built as described below.
Tip: It is easiest to first have Kata Containers running on your system and then modify it to run containers in SNP-VMs. Follow the Developer guide and then follow the below steps. Nonetheless, you can just follow this guide from the start.
Follow all of the below steps to install Kata Containers with SNP-support from scratch. These steps mostly follow the developer guide with modifications to support SNP
Steps from the Developer Guide:
- Get all the required components for building the kata-runtime
- Build the and install kata-runtime
- Build a custom agent
- Create an initrd image by first building a rootfs, then building the initrd based on the rootfs, use a custom agent and install.
ubuntu
works as the distribution of choice. - Get the required components to build a custom kernel
SNP-specific steps:
- Build the SNP-specific kernel as shown below (see this guide for more information)
$ pushd kata-containers/tools/packaging/
$ ./kernel/build-kernel.sh -a x86_64 -x snp setup
$ ./kernel/build-kernel.sh -a x86_64 -x snp build
$ sudo -E PATH="${PATH}" ./kernel/build-kernel.sh -x snp install
$ popd
- Build a current OVMF capable of SEV-SNP:
$ pushd kata-containers/tools/packaging/static-build/ovmf
$ ./build.sh
$ tar -xvf edk2-x86_64.tar.gz
$ popd
- Build a custom QEMU
$ source kata-containers/tools/packaging/scripts/lib.sh
$ qemu_url="$(get_from_kata_deps ".assets.hypervisor.qemu-snp-experimental.url")"
$ qemu_tag="$(get_from_kata_deps ".assets.hypervisor.qemu-snp-experimental.tag")"
$ git clone "${qemu_url}"
$ pushd qemu
$ git checkout "${qemu_tag}"
$ ./configure --enable-virtfs --target-list=x86_64-softmmu --enable-debug
$ make -j "$(nproc)"
$ popd
The configuration file located at /etc/kata-containers/configuration.toml
must be adapted as follows to support SNP-VMs:
- Use the SNP-specific kernel for the guest VM (change path)
kernel = "/usr/share/kata-containers/vmlinuz-snp.container"
- Enable the use of an initrd (uncomment)
initrd = "/usr/share/kata-containers/kata-containers-initrd.img"
- Disable the use of a rootfs (comment out)
# image = "/usr/share/kata-containers/kata-containers.img"
- Use the custom QEMU capable of SNP (change path)
path = "/path/to/qemu/build/qemu-system-x86_64"
- Use
virtio-9p
device sincevirtio-fs
is unsupported due to bugs / shortcomings in QEMU versionsnp-v3
for SEV and SEV-SNP (change value)
shared_fs = "virtio-9p"
- Disable
virtiofsd
since it is no longer required (comment out)
# virtio_fs_daemon = "/usr/libexec/virtiofsd"
- Disable NVDIMM (uncomment)
disable_image_nvdimm = true
- Disable shared memory (uncomment)
file_mem_backend = ""
- Enable confidential guests (uncomment)
confidential_guest = true
- Enable SNP-VMs (uncomment)
sev_snp_guest = true
- Configure an OVMF (add path)
firmware = "/path/to/kata-containers/tools/packaging/static-build/ovmf/opt/kata/share/ovmf/OVMF.fd"
With Kata Containers configured to support SNP-VMs, we use containerd to test and deploy containers in these VMs.
If not already present, follow this guide to install containerd and its related components including CNI
and the cri-tools
(skip Kata Containers since we already installed it)
Follow this guide to configure containerd to use Kata Containers
Run the below commands to start a container. See this guide for more information
$ sudo ctr image pull docker.io/library/busybox:latest
$ sudo ctr run --cni --runtime io.containerd.run.kata.v2 -t --rm docker.io/library/busybox:latest hello sh
Inside the running container, run the following commands to check if SNP is active. It should look something like this:
/ # dmesg | grep -i sev
[ 0.299242] Memory Encryption Features active: AMD SEV SEV-ES SEV-SNP
[ 0.472286] SEV: Using SNP CPUID table, 31 entries present.
[ 0.514574] SEV: SNP guest platform device initialized.
[ 0.885425] sev-guest sev-guest: Initialized SEV guest driver (using vmpck_id 0)
To obtain an attestation report inside the container, the /dev/sev-guest
must first be configured. As of now, the VM does not perform this step, however it can be performed inside the container, either in the terminal or in code.
Example for shell:
/ # SNP_MAJOR=$(cat /sys/devices/virtual/misc/sev-guest/dev | awk -F: '{print $1}')
/ # SNP_MINOR=$(cat /sys/devices/virtual/misc/sev-guest/dev | awk -F: '{print $2}')
/ # mknod -m 600 /dev/sev-guest c "${SNP_MAJOR}" "${SNP_MINOR}"
- Support for cgroups v2 is still work in progress. If issues occur due to cgroups v2 becoming the default in newer systems, one possible solution is to downgrade cgroups to v1:
sudo sed -i 's/^\(GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=".*\)"/\1 systemd.unified_cgroup_hierarchy=0"/' /etc/default/grub
sudo update-grub
sudo reboot
- If both SEV and SEV-SNP are supported by the host, Kata Containers uses SEV-SNP by default. You can verify what features are enabled by checking
/sys/module/kvm_amd/parameters/sev
andsev_snp
. This means that Kata Containers can not run both SEV-SNP-VMs and SEV-VMs at the same time. If SEV is to be used by Kata Containers instead, reload thekvm_amd
kernel module without SNP-support, this will disable SNP-support for the entire platform.
sudo rmmod kvm_amd && sudo modprobe kvm_amd sev_snp=0