While Ubuntu 25.04 has been shipping since April and following software support already upstreamed into the Linux kernel and related virtualization components, Ubuntu maker Canonical today put out a blog post to announce their AMD SEV-SNP host support found in Ubuntu 25.04. This complements the guest-side support present since Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and is an important milestone on the host-side ahead of next year’s Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release.
AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP) has all the necessary host support in place with the Ubuntu 25.04 interim release. With most major enterprise sticking to the Long Term Support (LTS) releases this isn’t particularly pressing but important to have all squared away ahead of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS next April. This follows Ubuntu shipping Intel TDX support since last year for CoCo VMs on the Xeon side.
From kernel space the host bits landed in Linux 6.11 although further improvements have been merged since. Fedora 41 last year already was shipping SEV-SNP support for confidential host virtualization support. Some elements of that support were delayed to Fedora 42, which shipped earlier this year — two days ahead of Ubuntu 25.04.
It’s been known that AMD SEV-SNP host support should work in Ubuntu 25.04 albeit only now being officially promoted by Canonical. With all of that said, rather interestingly their blog post notes:
“This makes Ubuntu the first production-grade Linux distribution to support AMD SEV-SNP from host to guest. No out-of-tree patches, no experimental builds: it all works out of the box. With this, you can now deploy confidential virtual machines (CVMs) on entirely Ubuntu-based stacks, in private clouds, or on bare metal nodes in public clouds.”
To which really doesn’t make much sense unless Canonical doesn’t consider Fedora and rolling-release distributions and the like “production-grade” Linux distributions… Canonical is just riding on all of the SEV-SNP open-source, upstream work that’s been happening since the EPYC 7003 days.
In any event those wishing to learn more about Ubuntu 25.04’s host support for AMD SEV-SNP for confidential computing virtualization can do so via the Ubuntu.com blog.
