23 Dec
2022
23 Dec
'22
10:08 a.m.
Good morning folks,
My VPS is on Ubuntu 18.04 and it's plainly time to upgrade. And as I have some time
off between Christmas and New Year, I figured I should do it then.
I see that there's a few possible gotchas to do with PV/PVH mode and supported kernel
compression methods... so I thought I'd ask if anyone's done an upgrade from 18.04
to 20.04, and what tips they have.
I was thinking of starting the upgrade, then switching virtmode in the Xen shell before
the first reboot. Will that work? Or does it need to be a clean VM boot rather than just a
restart for it to work?
Or is it better to try to get 18.04 working with PVH (using the HWE kernel) and then do
the upgrade?
Any other gotchas that folks have encountered? The VPS just runs email (exim4/dovecot) and
apache, I don't expect any issues with them, and I'm familiar enough with them
that I can fix any oddities that do crop up. It's just the kernel/Xen changes that
have me being cautious...
Thanks,
Phil
23 Dec
23 Dec
4:11 p.m.
Hi Philip,
On Fri, Dec 23, 2022 at 10:08:50AM +0000, Philip Storry via BitFolk Users wrote:
My VPS is on Ubuntu 18.04 and it's plainly time to
upgrade. And as
I have some time off between Christmas and New Year, I figured I
should do it then.
Hopefully your VM is 64-bit. If it's 32-bit, Ubuntu stopped
supporting that before 20.04 so there wouldn't be an upgrade path
and you'd have to reinstall.
I see that there's a few possible gotchas to do
with PV/PVH mode
and supported kernel compression methods... so I thought I'd ask
if anyone's done an upgrade from 18.04 to 20.04, and what tips
they have.
I've done it a few times for testing, but that would be on VMs with
basically no applications installed just the base OS, so I can't
talk about any tricky app configuration changes.
I was thinking of starting the upgrade, then switching
virtmode in
the Xen shell before the first reboot. Will that work? Or does it
need to be a clean VM boot rather than just a restart for it to
work? Or is it better to try to get 18.04 working with PVH (using
the HWE kernel) and then do the upgrade?
Due to the trickiness with the compression methods for 20.04
kernels, I think you will have an easier time switching to PVH
before you upgrade from 18.04. So I would indeed go ahead and
install the HWE kernel and check it boots in PVH move on 18.04, as
you can easily switch back to PV mode if it doesn't. Just don't
uninstall the older kernel until you're happy it works.
Once you;re in PVH mode running the HWE kernel you should be able
to do-release-upgrade without any complications.
Any other gotchas that folks have encountered? The VPS
just runs
email (exim4/dovecot) and apache, I don't expect any issues with
them, and I'm familiar enough with them that I can fix any
oddities that do crop up. It's just the kernel/Xen changes that
have me being cautious...
I would expect the apache and dovecot configurations to change quite
a bit between 18.04 and 20.04, so do watch out for that.
Cheers,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
4:46 p.m.
This seems a lot of hassle just to run a mail server. Why not use Debian?
Iain
On 23 Dec 2022 at 4:11 pm, Andy Smith via BitFolk Users
<users(a)mailman.bitfolk.com> wrote:
Hi Philip,
On Fri, Dec 23, 2022 at 10:08:50AM +0000, Philip Storry via BitFolk Users wrote:
My VPS is on Ubuntu 18.04 and it's plainly
time to upgrade. And as
I have some time off between Christmas and New Year, I figured I
should do it then.
Hopefully your VM is 64-bit. If it's 32-bit, Ubuntu stopped
supporting that before 20.04 so there wouldn't be an upgrade path
and you'd have to reinstall.
I see that there's a few possible gotchas to
do with PV/PVH mode
and supported kernel compression methods... so I thought I'd ask
if anyone's done an upgrade from 18.04 to 20.04, and what tips
they have.
I've done it a few times for testing, but that would be on VMs with
basically no applications installed just the base OS, so I can't
talk about any tricky app configuration changes.
I was thinking of starting the upgrade, then
switching virtmode in
the Xen shell before the first reboot. Will that work? Or does it
need to be a clean VM boot rather than just a restart for it to
work? Or is it better to try to get 18.04 working with PVH (using
the HWE kernel) and then do the upgrade?
Due to the trickiness with the compression methods for 20.04
kernels, I think you will have an easier time switching to PVH
before you upgrade from 18.04. So I would indeed go ahead and
install the HWE kernel and check it boots in PVH move on 18.04, as
you can easily switch back to PV mode if it doesn't. Just don't
uninstall the older kernel until you're happy it works.
Once you;re in PVH mode running the HWE kernel you should be able
to do-release-upgrade without any complications.
Any other gotchas that folks have encountered?
The VPS just runs
email (exim4/dovecot) and apache, I don't expect any issues with
them, and I'm familiar enough with them that I can fix any
oddities that do crop up. It's just the kernel/Xen changes that
have me being cautious...
I would expect the apache and dovecot configurations to change quite
a bit between 18.04 and 20.04, so do watch out for that.
Cheers,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
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5:40 p.m.
Hi Iain,
On Fri, Dec 23, 2022 at 04:46:20PM +0000, iain via BitFolk Users wrote:
This seems a lot of hassle just to run a mail server.
Why not use Debian?
What is significantly different about upgrading from Ubuntu 18.04 to
20.04 vs. upgrading from Debian 10 to Debian 11?
The main difference in my view is that Ubuntu made some choices
about kernel compression options that aren't well-supported by Xen's
bootloaders, necessitating a switch to PVH mode. Arguably that is on
Xen for not keeping up, rather than on Ubuntu for being adventurous.
Also we would recommend that everyone switch to PVH mode *anyway*
(it has been the default here since 2020).
Cheers,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
489
days inactive
489
days old
3 comments
3 participants
participants (3)
-
Andy Smith -
iain -
phil＠philipstorry.net