(Originally published in the Fall of 2018 in DeveloperWorks)
Power9 introduces secure boot to PowerVM in 2017. PowerVM secure boot, which implements a processor based chain of trust, verifies the integrity of PowerVM firmware, including Power Hypervisor, adjunct partition firmware, and (client LPAR) Partition Firmware, via their digital signatures (see
POWER9 Introduces Secure Boot to PowerVM and
POWER9 Firmware Chain of Trust for PowerVM )
The AIX secure boot extends the chain of trust to AIX LPAR by digitally verifying the AIX codes including the OS bootloader, the kernel, and the runtime environment, namely device drivers, kernel extensions, applications, and shared libraries. This old blog provides information about AIX secure boot overview and details.