Question on SGX BIOS Switches

[Sam5]

Hi,

What are the support BIOS switches for SGX? What does Application Enabled mean?

-Thanks

[Surenthar_S_Intel · Accepted solution]

Hi Sam,

BIOS switches for SGX:

Enabled, Disabled, and Software Controlled (or Application Enabled, or some other wording that is similar).

• Enabled means it is on.
• Disabled means it is off.
• Software Controlled means that an SGX application will flip the bit to enabled the first time one runs. It uses the Platform Software to do this (PSW)

The reason for the software controlled state is because SGX does consume up to 128 MB of RAM (on current platforms) for the processor reserve memory, about 90 MB of which is used for the enclave page cache. OEM's prefer not to have these resources consumed by default if there are no SGX applications installed on the system.

Thanks and Regards,

Surenthar Selvaraj

[Sam5]

Thanks for your detailed info...