Terms

Core Performance Boost (CPB)

Also called Turbo Core. AMD's Turbo boost, can boost the frequency of CPU (Per Core) when requested by the OS. [1]

Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV)

SEV is a tech made to protect the memory of virtual machine, all the next implementation are upgrade of each other and include those who came before:

  1. Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SME): Single key to encrypt the whose system memory
  2. Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV): One key per guest VM
  3. Secure Encrypted Virtualization-Encrypted State (SEV-ES): Also encrypts the CPU cache when you put the VM on hold
  4. Secure Encrypted Virtualization-Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP): Adds strong memory integrity protection to help prevent malicious hypervisor-based attacks like data replay, memory re-mapping, and more in order to create an isolated execution environment. IN OTHER WORDS can detect when memory is being messed with.[2]

Reverse Map Table

EV-SNP relies on a novel data structure known as the Reverse Map Table (RMP) to enforce various integrity guarantees. The RMP is a system-wide data structure that contains an entry for each 4k page of DRAM available for VM usage. Its primary purpose is to track the ownership of each memory page, which can belong to the hypervisor, a specific VM, or the AMD-SP.

Not all memory accesses require an RMP check. For instance, read accesses from the hypervisor or non-SEV-SNP guests are exempted since data confidentiality is already protected through AES memory encryption. However, all write accesses, regardless of the mode, necessitate an RMP check.[3]
The check provided by the RMP is done at the physical level, so in the case of a VM, after going into SLAT.

Segmented RMP

New to Linux 6.14, using the RMPREAD instruction you can divide your RMP to put the relevant RMP segment in the right NUMA node for faster use, before, RMP needed to be continuous in memory.[4]

Secure TSC

Secure TSC is a feature with SEV-SNP-enabled EPYC server processors for allowing VMs/guests to securely use the RDTSC and RDTSCP instructions for secure timestamp counter access. The secured aspect is ensuring that the hypervisor cannot alter the RDTSC/RDTSCP parameters after the guest is launched.[4-1]

System Management unit (SMU)

the SMU on the AMD Radeon graphics processors is effectively the system management unit that runs the power management firmware and is responsible for various power management tasks of the GPU.[5]

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