Containerize all the things! Arm v9 takes security seriously

Enlarge / There are two types of reactions to this marketing image: "ooh, shiny!" and "oh god no, all that particulate will get in the socket..." (credit: Arm)

On Tuesday afternoon, Arm held a Vision Day event at which it teased details about its upcoming Arm v9 architecture.

The short version: expect a massively altered security landscape, along with improvements to vector math (which in turn means improvements in AI/ML and Digital Signal Processing, among other applications).

Confidential Compute Architecture

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  If you're hoping for gritty technical detail on how realms actually work, we've got bad news for you-so far, Arm's not telling. [credit: Arm ]

The key concept introduced in Arm v9's new Confidential Compute Architecture is the realm. Realms are containerized, isolated execution environments, completely opaque to both operating system and hypervisor. The hypervisor itself will only be responsible for scheduling and resource allocation. Realms themselves are to be managed by the realm manager-a new concept that can apparently be implemented in 1/10th the code required for a hypervisor.

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