Re: [PATCH v12 00/46] arm64: Support for Arm CCA in KVM

[Steven Price <steven.price@arm.com>]

On 16/02/2026 12:33, Steven Price wrote:
> On 12/02/2026 17:48, Mathieu Poirier wrote:
>> Hi Steven,
>>
>> On Wed, Dec 17, 2025 at 10:10:37AM +0000, Steven Price wrote:
>>> This series adds support for running protected VMs using KVM under the
>>> Arm Confidential Compute Architecture (CCA). I've changed the uAPI
>>> following feedback from Marc.
>>>
>>> The main change is that rather than providing a multiplex CAP and
>>> expecting the VMM to drive the different stages of realm construction,
>>> there's now just a minimal interface and KVM performs the necessary
>>> operations when needed.
>>>
>>> This series is lightly tested and is meant as a demonstration of the new
>>> uAPI. There are a number of (known) rough corners in the implementation
>>> that I haven't dealt with properly.
>>>
>>> In particular please note that this series is still targetting RMM v1.0.
>>> There is an alpha quality version of RMM v2.0 available[1]. Feedback was
>>> that there are a number of blockers for merging with RMM v1.0 and so I
>>> expect to rework this series to support RMM v2.0 before it is merged.
>>> That will necessarily involve reworking the implementation.
>>>
>>> Specifically I'm expecting improvements in:
>>>
>>>  * GIC handling - passing state in registers, and allowing the host to
>>>    fully emulate the GIC by allowing trap bits to be set.
>>>
>>>  * PMU handling - again providing flexibility to the host's emulation.
>>>
>>>  * Page size/granule size mismatch. RMM v1.0 defines the granule as 4k,
>>>    RMM v2.0 provide the option for the host to change the granule size.
>>>    The intention is that Linux would simply set the granule size equal
>>>    to its page size which will significantly simplify the management of
>>>    granules.
>>>
>>>  * Some performance improvement from the use of range-based map/unmap
>>>    RMI calls.
>>>
>>> This series is based on v6.19-rc1. It is also available as a git
>>> repository:
>>>
>>> https://gitlab.arm.com/linux-arm/linux-cca cca-host/v12
>>>
>>> Work in progress changes for kvmtool are available from the git
>>> repository below:
>>>
>>> https://gitlab.arm.com/linux-arm/kvmtool-cca cca/v10
>>
>> The first thing to note is that branch cca/v10 does not compile due to function
>> realm_configure_parameters() not being called anywhere.  Marking the function as
>> [[maybe_unused]] solved the problem on my side.
> 
> This is in the kvmtool code - and yes I agree "work in progress" is a
> bit generous for the current state of that code, "horrid ugly hacks to
> get things working" is probably more accurate ;)
> 
> The issue here is that the two things that realm_configure_parameters()
> set up (hash algorithm and RPV) are currently unsupported with the Linux
> changes, but will need to be reintroduced in the future. So the contents
> of the functions which set this up (using the old uAPI) are just #if 0'd
> out.
> 
> Depending on the compile flags the code will compile with a warning, but
> using __attribute__((unused)) would at least make this clear. I'd want
> to avoid the "[[maybe_unused]]" as it's not used elsewhere in the code
> base and limits compatibility.
> 
>> Using the FVP emulator, booting a Realm that includes EDK2 in its boot stack
>> worked.  If EDK2 is not part of the boot stack and a kernel is booted directly
>> from lkvm, mounting the initrd fails.  Looking into this issue further, I see
>> that from a Realm kernel's perspective, the content of the initrd is either
>> encrypted or has been trampled on.  
> 
> I can reproduce that, a quick fix is to change INITRD_ALIGN:
> 
> #define INITRD_ALIGN	SZ_64K
> 
> But the code was meant to be able to deal with an unaligned initrd -
> I'll see if I can figure out what's going wrong.

Looks like a simple bug in kvm_arm_realm_populate_ram() - it wasn't
updating the source address when it had to align the start of the
region. Simple fix below:

---8<---
diff --git a/arm/aarch64/realm.c b/arm/aarch64/realm.c
--- a/arm/aarch64/realm.c
+++ b/arm/aarch64/realm.c
@@ -104,7 +104,7 @@ void kvm_arm_realm_populate_ram(struct kvm *kvm,
unsigned long start,

        new_region->start = ALIGN_DOWN(start, SZ_64K);
        new_region->file_end = ALIGN(start + size, SZ_64K);
-       new_region->source = source;
+       new_region->source = source - (start - new_region->start);

        list_add_tail(&new_region->list, &realm_ram_regions);
 }
---8<---

Thanks for the pointer, and I'll try to remember to include initrd
testing in future.

Steve