gpg: Signature made Thu Nov 12 19:59:31 2020 UTC
gpg: using DSA key 2099B64CBF15490B
gpg: Good signature from "Andy Smith <andy@strugglers.net>" [unknown]
gpg: aka "Andrew James Smith <andy@strugglers.net>" [unknown]
gpg: aka "Andy Smith (UKUUG) <andy.smith@ukuug.org>" [unknown]
gpg: aka "Andy Smith (BitFolk Ltd.) <andy@bitfolk.com>" [unknown]
gpg: aka "Andy Smith (Linux User Groups UK) <andy@lug.org.uk>" [unknown]
gpg: aka "Andy Smith (Cernio Technology Cooperative) <andy.smith@cernio.com>" [unknown]
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
