AMD Publishes SEV Firmware As Open-Source

While I have been eagerly following the AMD openSIL project for open-source CPU initialization that will eventually replace AGESA, today AMD announced a new open-source firmware drop: the SEV firmware has been made open-source.

The firmware necessary for AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) had been made open-source and is publicly available. AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization provides a variety of security protections for virtual machines (VMs) working on EPYC platforms.

AMD announced the open-source firmware for SEV as part of "[sharing] the technical details of technology powering innovative confidential computing." AMD SEV is used by EPYC virtual machines on Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Cloud, and Oracle Compute Infrastructure.

As I have covered in many Phoronix articles in the past, AMD has upstreamed the necessary SEV support into the mainline Linux kernel both for the host as well as on the VM side with the likes of KVM. It's nice to see now that even the SEV firmware is open-source to ensure better auditability and independent evaluation of the code for security and other purposes.

The SEV firmware source code can be found on GitHub and current correlates to the firmware in use by AMD EPYC 9004 "Genoa" processors.

AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) Firmware for 4th Generation AMD EPYC® Processors Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) Firmware License

Copyright © 2023 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.

In an effort to increase transparency in the security space, Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. ("AMD") is making the source code for the AMD SEV firmware for 4th Generation AMD EPYC Processors (formerly codenamed "Genoa") (the "Software") available to you (either an individual or an entity) ("You") to assess; AMD is not accepting contributions to this Software.

It is worth noting though that the firmware isn't under a traditional open-source license and they will not be accepting community contributions, but the source is mostly there for independent analysis purposes.