RADV Vulkan Driver Adds Memory Protection Using AMD Trusted Memory Zone

The newest Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" feature enabled by AMD engineers is protected memory support using the Trusted Memory Zone (TMZ) support on newer GPUs.

Vulkan memory allocations support the notion of protected memory and unprotected memory. The protected memory use-case for graphics is most commonly associated with Digital Rights Management (DRM) content or securely dealing with other encrypted content. Vulkan protected memory has been around since Vulkan 1.1 while now RADV is enabling support for the "protectedMemory" option.

This protected memory support for RADV is making use of AMD Trusted Memory Zone (TMZ) hardware feature for memory encryption on recent Radeon GPUs. AMD has worked on Linux support for Trusted Memory Zone going back to 2019 and is nothing new, just the difference now being that Vulkan apps can make use of it via Vulkan protected memory capabilities. The RadeonSI driver already supports using TMZ as well.

Those interested in Vulkan protected memory support with AMD TMZ in RADV can find out all the details via this merge for Mesa 26.2.