Re: The current status of PKS virtualization

[Chenyi Qiang]

On 11/11/2025 9:14 AM, Ruihan Li wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 10, 2025 at 09:44:36PM +0100, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
>> No, there is none. In fact, the only dependency of the original series
>> on host PKS was for functions to read/write the host PKRS MSR. Without
>> host PKS support it could be loaded with all-ones, or technically it
>> could even be left with the guest value. Since the host clears
>> CR4.PKS, the actual value won't matter.
> 
> Thanks a lot for your quick and detailed reply! That's good news for me.
> Then I plan to spend some time tidying up my rebased version to see if I
> can get PKS virtualization upstreamed.
> 
> As a side note, I can no longer contact the original author of this
> patch series. At least, my previous email was returned by Intel's
> server. However, since more than three years have passed, I assume it's
> okay for me to post a new version after I have the code ready.

Lei has left Intel so the mail address in unreachable.

And as you found, we dropped the PKS KVM upstream along with the base PKS support
due to no valid use case in Linux. You can feel free to continue the upstream work.
But I'm not sure if your use case is compelling enough to be accepted by maintainers.

> 
> Thanks,
> Ruihan Li
>