topic Debian OS support in Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel® SGX)

Debian OS support

Anandakumar — Wed, 15 Sep 2021 09:43:50 GMT

Hello,

Why there is no support for Debian OS?

Is it possible to run the current SGX versions on Debian 11(since Debian and Ubuntu are very close variants).

Why I am asking this is, after the CentOS 8 EOL issue most of the cloud data centers moving towards other distribution, in that major option is Debian.

Thanks,

Anand

Re:Debian OS support

JesusG_Intel — Wed, 15 Sep 2021 23:13:55 GMT

Hello Anandakumar,

The supported OS list consists of OSes that were fully validated by Intel to work with SGX. Intel cannot validate every OS in the ecosystem - it's just not possible. Intel validates the major operating systems, especially those with Long Term Support (LTS), like Ubuntu and RHEL. Our Ubuntu .deb packages may work on Debian, but we have not validated the functionality and dependencies, etc. Our hope is that now that the SGX driver has been upstreamed into the Linux kernel, the distributions will begin pulling our other components, building and validating themselves, just like they do with all other Linux libraries/components.

You may want to look at Rocky Linux, which is the CentOS creator’s new distribution that continues to be downstream from RHEL, vs. upstream as CentOS-Stream is. Though brand new, it is the closest to the traditional CentOS. Some folks have found that the SGX components work in Rocky Linux but it has not been validated by Intel, therefore, it is NOT officially supported.

Sincerely,

Jesus G.

Intel Customer Support

Re:Debian OS support

JesusG_Intel — Tue, 21 Sep 2021 17:23:17 GMT

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