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

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.

--
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