Intel's Vulkan Linux Driver Adds Protected Memory Support

Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver within Mesa has added support for the protected memory feature available with Vulkan 1.1+.

For Mesa 24.0, Intel ANV now enables the "protectedMemory" device property for making use of protected contexts with recent Intel graphics hardware. With the Intel driver implementation it relies on the Protected Xe Path (PXP) functionality with DG2/Alchemist class graphics. Intel PXP is ultimately for encrypted video memory and a trusted execution environment for protecting the PXP sessions from other clients.

Merged to Mesa 24.0-devel this week was the two year old merge request wiring up the Intel ANV driver for exposing the Vulkan protected memory support via PXP. So for those doing sensitive tasks on the GPU, it's possible now to employ the hardware-backed vRAM encryption on memory allocations.

For testing out the Vulkan protected memory support they created a patch for VkCube.