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#openstack-nova - 2026-08-19
09:04:52 sean-k-mooney that really fells like it shoudl have been out of scope
09:05:09 gibi you mean attestation?
09:05:09 antia removing the need for -cpu host was marked as future work, but not sure where it is today
09:05:10 antia removing the need for -cpu host was marked as future work
09:05:13 antia ops
09:05:17 antia https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2025-04/msg00097.html
09:05:23 sean-k-mooney yes enabel attestation in a portable way is a seprate feature in my view
09:05:35 gibi sean-k-mooney: sure nova does nothing really with attestation
09:05:37 sean-k-mooney so i woudl have wanted that to be its own spec adn have its own extra spec
09:05:49 sean-k-mooney gibi: but we used too
09:06:03 sean-k-mooney we had supprot for opens attstation and trusted boot before
09:06:04 gibi the sev one works out of the box via the cpu itself. the tdx works via a local socket added automatically by libvirt to the guest
09:06:06 sean-k-mooney and we riped it out
09:06:24 gibi so we don't carry any code
09:06:26 sean-k-mooney and we have been asked looks at supprot keylime in the future
09:06:28 gibi and documented nothing
09:06:42 gibi regarding attestation
09:06:59 sean-k-mooney gibi: rgith btu we dotn supprot atested boot today
09:07:04 sean-k-mooney meaning you cant file a bug agasint nova if it does not work
09:07:13 antia this is not attested boot though
09:07:14 gibi sure, that is fine by me :)
09:07:44 sean-k-mooney as long as we dont have to fix bugs related to attestation for tdx im ok with it
09:08:16 antia yeah that is more or less why it was included in the documentation to remove any expectation of Nova doing attestations
09:08:21 sean-k-mooney antia: if the tdx attestation feature is not related to messered secure boot what is it
09:08:54 sean-k-mooney antia: well the docs dont say that its unsuprpoted right. can we just not allcoate teh socket?
09:09:24 sean-k-mooney so that thing we are not testing or cliaming to supprot is not enabled
09:10:42 gibi sean-k-mooney: I would let libvirt do the default that allows anybody who want to try a chance to make it work
09:11:11 sean-k-mooney so i dont htink these type of side channle shoud lbe aviabel to folks to hook up like that
09:11:28 sean-k-mooney like if live migration for exmaple get implemtne only when the socket is not used
09:11:48 sean-k-mooney we woudl not want ot have to chosoe betwen possiebl breakign folks that set it up and making live migration work
09:11:51 gibi we expect that if we use the libvirt default then that will work with future features
09:12:12 gibi what if not having the socket will break the live migration/
09:12:15 gibi ?
09:12:34 gibi we should not do hypoteticals. Use the underlying default is the safest in my eyes
09:12:59 sean-k-mooney its not that the socket will break it its we are enabling a feature that we dont know the side effect of
09:13:19 gibi we are not enabling it, libvirt does.
09:13:36 sean-k-mooney so we are not addign it to the domain
09:13:41 sean-k-mooney ok
09:13:59 gibi and the whole reason to have these features is to be able to prove that your VM is secure
09:14:10 sean-k-mooney no
09:14:14 gibi so blocking the possibility of that actively is against the goal
09:14:19 sean-k-mooney its to encypt the guest memory
09:14:31 sean-k-mooney proving its secure is its own feature
09:14:33 gibi but how would you know that it is encrypted?
09:14:37 antia encrypting the guest memory is somewhat useless unless it can be proven
09:14:46 sean-k-mooney that is my point attestation of any kind shoudl ahve been its own dedicated feature
09:15:15 sean-k-mooney gibi: im not sure you shoudl knwo that as a normal user or how
09:15:35 sean-k-mooney beyond the flavor extra spec if that is expsoed to you in the releven tcloud
09:15:50 gibi but the premise is that you don't trust the provider so you need a way to be safe
09:16:04 gibi so if the provider tells you it is encrypted you wont trust that either
09:16:26 sean-k-mooney this socket conenct to a deamon run on the host by the provdier
09:16:31 sean-k-mooney you cant trust that eitehr
09:17:25 gibi I guess there are mechanism to make that work. I guess it is just the channel not the source of truth
09:17:43 antia this goes beyond the scope I think. Intel has documentation on this process
09:18:05 sean-k-mooney antia im trying not to second guess the spec
09:18:16 gibi sean-k-mooney: if this helps I'm OK to say in the doc that nova does not actively support attestation. So we can close bugs. But actively preventing attestation I'm not OK with
09:18:20 sean-k-mooney im just highlihgt that i woudl have ask for this to be remvoed if i had reviewed the spec
09:18:35 sean-k-mooney so im highlighting the maintaince concern here not saying we ahve to remove it
09:18:45 sean-k-mooney gibi: yes that woudl help
09:18:51 gibi then lets do that
09:18:54 antia that I can add
09:19:04 gibi thanks both of you
09:19:34 sean-k-mooney gibi: im just sentitve to the fact that folks have come to depend on the internals of some feature that we didnt intnet to be public in the past
09:19:55 sean-k-mooney i.e. cloud-init incorrectly usign our dmi/smbios code to detech that its oepnstack
09:20:02 gibi I think in case of AMD you cannot even prevent attestation from libvirt if encryption is on
09:20:09 sean-k-mooney even though that only ever worked for libvirt
09:20:43 sean-k-mooney ack
09:21:17 sean-k-mooney antia: for what its woth the feature more or less looks ok
09:21:35 sean-k-mooney the main blocker for me is you missing the libvirt version check and the cgroups issue i mentioned in teh review
09:21:51 antia thanks for reviewing!
09:21:58 sean-k-mooney antia: once those 2 issues are adressed i think we can more or less proceed with the series
09:22:00 antia the cgroup issue I am resolving right now
09:22:26 sean-k-mooney cool
09:23:32 gibi sean-k-mooney: about the version check
09:23:34 antia I am not strictly against a version check for TDX, but I find it unnecessary. The same isn't done for SNP and it is not needed since Libvirt capabilities can handle it
09:23:41 gibi yeah ^^
09:24:07 gibi so libvirt only reports the domcap if libvirt + qemu is supporting the feature
09:24:25 sean-k-mooney oh we already have that supproted via domcaps
09:24:29 gibi yeah
09:24:34 sean-k-mooney and we are usign that to fileter the traits reporitng
09:24:38 gibi the flag yes, the capacity does not
09:24:39 sean-k-mooney ok then jsut the cgroups issue
09:24:50 gibi yepp
09:24:54 antia okay good
09:24:57 sean-k-mooney sorry i missed that
09:25:37 gibi no worries
09:40:24 gibi so about scsi. On my machine the VM is created successfully but cannot boot. It stops at the EFI setup not seeing a boot device
09:56:28 antia that is consistent with my previous experience
10:27:15 sean-k-mooney that is becaus of the qemu firmware image yes?
10:27:25 sean-k-mooney so it may or may not work dependin on that
10:27:41 sean-k-mooney im not sure if we shoudl relaly block it in nova but we shoudl call it out in the docs
10:39:43 gibi yepp call it out in the doc
10:40:06 gibi (and yes I tested without TDX that the same image boots from scsi)
10:40:58 sean-k-mooney ack, i partly wonder if we are jsut mising setting somethign liek the iommu options we recnelty stop setting for sev
10:41:15 sean-k-mooney but i guess we can follow up with improvment next cycle if we discover a way to supprot it
10:41:22 sean-k-mooney and jsut treat it as a minor bugfix
10:41:41 gibi OK
11:16:23 opendevreview Bhavana proposed openstack/nova-specs master: Add spec for MIG-aware PCI Host Weigher https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/nova-specs/+/998753
11:52:49 sean-k-mooney im generally not sure ^ is something that is really in nova scope now
11:53:20 sean-k-mooney cybrog will need a way to provide its own way to experss schdulign prioties in the future

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