Quick start

Prerequisites

Gramine without SGX has no special requirements.

Gramine with SGX support requires several features from your system:

  • the FSGSBASE feature of recent processors must be enabled in the Linux kernel;
  • the Intel SGX driver must be built in the Linux kernel;
  • Intel SGX SDK/PSW and (optionally) Intel DCAP must be installed.

If your system doesn’t meet these requirements, please refer to more detailed descriptions in Building.

We supply a tool is-sgx-available – Check environment for SGX compatibility, which you can use to check your hardware and system. It’s installed together with the respective gramine package (see below).

Install Gramine

On Ubuntu 18.04 or 20.04 (for 18.04, in intel-sgx.list, replace focal with bionic):

sudo curl -fsSLo /usr/share/keyrings/gramine-keyring.gpg https://packages.gramineproject.io/gramine-keyring.gpg
echo 'deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/gramine-keyring.gpg] https://packages.gramineproject.io/ stable main' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gramine.list

curl -fsSL https://download.01.org/intel-sgx/sgx_repo/ubuntu/intel-sgx-deb.key | sudo apt-key add -
echo 'deb [arch=amd64] https://download.01.org/intel-sgx/sgx_repo/ubuntu focal main' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/intel-sgx.list
# (if you're on Ubuntu 18.04, remember to write "bionic" instead of "focal")

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install gramine      # for 5.11+ upstream, in-kernel driver
sudo apt-get install gramine-oot  # for out-of-tree SDK driver
sudo apt-get install gramine-dcap # for out-of-tree DCAP driver

On RHEL-8-like distribution (like AlmaLinux 8, CentOS 8, Rocky Linux 8, …):

sudo curl -fsSLo /etc/yum.repos.d/gramine.repo https://packages.gramineproject.io/rpm/gramine.repo
sudo dnf install gramine          # only the default, distro-provided kernel is supported

Prepare a signing key

Only for SGX, and if you haven’t already:

gramine-sgx-gen-private-key

This command generates an RSA 3072 key suitable for signing SGX enclaves and stores it in HOME/.config/gramine/enclave-key.pem. This key needs to be protected and should not be disclosed to anyone.

Run sample application

Core Gramine repository contains several sample applications. Thus, to test Gramine installation, we clone the Gramine repo:

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/gramineproject/gramine.git v1.2

We don’t want to build Gramine (it is already installed on the system). Instead, we want to build and run the HelloWorld example. To build the HelloWorld application, we need the gcc compiler and the make build system:

sudo apt-get install gcc make  # for Ubuntu distribution
sudo dnf install gcc make      # for RHEL-8-like distribution

Go to the HelloWorld example directory:

cd gramine/CI-Examples/helloworld

Build and run without SGX:

make
gramine-direct helloworld

Build and run with SGX:

make SGX=1
gramine-sgx helloworld

Other sample applications

We prepared and tested several applications to demonstrate Gramine usability. These applications can be found in the CI-Examples directory in the repository, each containing a short README with instructions how to test it. We recommend starting with a simpler, thoroughly documented example of Redis, to understand manifest options and features of Gramine.

Additional sample configurations for applications enabled in Gramine can be found in a separate repository https://github.com/gramineproject/examples.

Please note that these sample applications are tested on Ubuntu 18.04 and 20.04. Most of these applications are also known to run correctly on Fedora/RHEL/CentOS, but with caveats. One caveat is that Makefiles should be invoked with ARCH_LIBDIR=/lib64 make. Another caveat is that applications that rely on specific versions/builds of Glibc may break (our GCC example is known to work only on Ubuntu).

glibc vs musl

Most of the examples we provide use GNU C Library (glibc). If your application is built against musl libc, you can pass 'musl' to gramine.runtimedir() when generating the manifest from a template, which will mount musl libc (instead of the default glibc).