[bitfolk] Volunteers sought for running 32-bit guests under pvshim

Hi, As you may recall we've been reminding you over the years that 32-bit guests need to be made a thing of the past for a variety of reasons - primarily security. Unfortunately, 30% of customers are still running a 32-bit PV mode guest, so there is no prospect of swiftly getting people to upgrade / reinstall¹. Luckily there is another mode called "pvshim", which runs a 64-bit PVH guest that chain loads the unmodified 32-bit PV guest. In our limited testing that works without any change on the guest administrator's side. So, if you're currently running a 32-bit PV mode VM please would you consider volunteering to let us test booting it under pvshim? If so, please reply to me off-list letting me know what sort of time of day would be acceptable to try it out. It would involve us shutting down your VM and then booting it again. It would be best if we did it, not you, as if there were a problem we'd just revert the configuration and boot your VM again. Once we're comfortable that it works on a wide variety of guests then we'd move all 32-bit PV guests to that setup which they would pick up at their next boot. If you don't actually know whether you're running 32-bit… - Typing "uname -m" will say "i686" for 32-bit and "x86_64" for 64-bit. - It also says it on the summary page of https://panel.bitfolk.com/account/ Cheers, Andy ¹ This pvshim thing is a last ditch option for people who can't upgrade their OS for whatever reason. It would in all cases be better to run an up to date version of Linux instead. The Linux kernel removed 32-bit Xen PV support at release 5.9.0, but anything newer than 4.19 should support being run in PVH mode, so that's what you'd do there. A 64-bit install running in PVH mode would be best. The default for a new install at BitFolk was switched to 64-bit PV in April 2013. It was switched to 64-bit PVH in November 2020. -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting