Re: [bitfolk] Some notes on BitFolk's plans to switch to PVH mode

Hi, I still have to update the documentation, but I went ahead and added a "virtmode" command to the Xen Shell so you can switch your existing VMs between PV and PVH mode and try it out. As per my testing I believe that anything with a Linux kernel 4.19+ should work, but if it doesn't you can switch it back. New accounts will be set to PVH by default (as long as they pick a distribution that works with that, which most of the new ones do), but existing ones will be left to switch when they are ready. I initially thought that for self-installs I would silently switch people to PVH mode where that is known to work, but I decided that would be too confusing. Instead I have made it strongly suggest to you that you switch, if that seems appropriate. The main gotcha I can think of at the moment for people switching is for those of you who have been set up with or upgraded to Ubuntu 20.04. To make that work we installed that kernel post-install hook at: /etc/kernel/postinst.d/bitfolk-decompress-lz4-kernels The kernels that leaves you with won't boot under PVH. To get ones that do work I'd guess you'd want to do something like: - Move /etc/kernel/postinst.d/bitfolk-decompress-lz4-kernels out of the way. - Reinstall your kernel e.g. $ sudo apt reinstall linux-image-5.4.0-29-generic After that the compressed kernel will be in place again. Probably best to make sure you do have a bootable kernel still laying about should things go wrong. Feedback about how it works, any suggested improvements etc are welcome. Though it's worth remembering that basically all new installs will be PVH mode and will never switch away from that, so for most customers this will be a zero or one time affair. Cheers, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting