Intel SGX Linux Patches Posted For Their 30th Round Of Review

Weeks ahead of the Linux 5.8 kernel cycle kicking off it's still not clear if the Intel SGX foundation patches will be ready for merging, but they were sent out today as version 30 of this long-running effort for supporting the Intel enclaves functionality on the mainline kernel.

The Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) enablement for Linux has been going on for years with different patch series. This work on the Secure Guard Extensions subsystem for the Linux kernel is about providing hardware-protected, encrypted memory regions with SGX enclaves. Intel SGX with Memory Encryption Engines (MEE) have been supported since Skylake CPUs on the hardware side.

The v30 patches are coming just under one month since the v29 patch series that saw many updates. With the Intel SGX foundations v30 patches, there aren't any actual code changes but just new tags added to the patches.

Given no code churn, perhaps everyone is finally content with the state of the patch series and we could see it mainlined soon. The Linux 5.8 kernel merge window should be open in early June and we'll see if these Intel SGX patches are finally accepted at that point.