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
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