OpenPOWER Summit North America 2019

IBM POWER9 architecture introduces  Protected Execution Facility (PEF) which enables secure memory, which can only be accessed when the processor is in a new higher privileged mode called Ultravisor mode.  Some facilities that were previously hypervisor privileged are now ultravisor privileged. This talk presents architectural changes for PEF,  the Protected Execution Ultravisor, and new services called ultra calls.  Combined with enhancements to the Virtual Machine format a new class of VMs called Secure Virtual Machines (SVM) is enabled.  SVMs utilize hypervisor services and run in secure memory under the control of the Ultravisor.  SVMs are protected from attacks from the Hypervisor, other privileged software entities, and privileged users on the system.  POWER9 systems can concurrently support both normal VMs and SVMs. All firmware and tools for PEF will be Open Sourced.