[bitfolk] Another prod regarding 32-bit guests

Hi, Those running 32-bit VMs who haven't thought about upgrading/reinstalling them to 64-bit yet, please have a read of: “There are no current plans to remove support for 32bit PV guests from Xen, but it is very much in the category of "you shouldn't be using this mode any more".” https://lists.xenproject.org/archives/html/xen-devel/2019-07/msg00827.html When Juergen asked for feedback on removing 32-bit guest support a year or two ago I told him that (at the time) more than 60% of BitFolk's user base was 32-bit and they'd need time to transition. Now that there is a stable grub release which supports PVH¹ booting Juergen is pushing this again and it will eventually go through to the Linux kernel. When Xen does remove 32-bit PV mode we can still continue to support 32-bit guests in PVH mode or HVM mode, so I will still make sure it works without customers having to do anything. But you should be clear that just because it will work doesn't mean it is a good idea! I have a round of updates to do and then I will start moving customers over to PVH mode where possible (requires 4.11+ kernel in guest). Cheers, Andy ¹ PVH mode guests run all the normal code paths of a kernel not under virtualisation except for their IO drivers like networking and block devices which are still paravirtualised for performance reasons. This results in a kernel that has a smaller attack surface as there is much less xen-specific code being used, it's faster and simpler. It also still doesn't require use of qemu on BitFolk's side. See: https://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Understanding_the_Virtualization_Spectrum for more information. -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting