Re: AWS EC2 Jessie preparations: Deprecating i386. Deprecating PVM.
Hello.
2014-11-04 1:56 GMT+01:00 Brian Gupta <brian.gupta@brandorr.com>:
> On Mon, Nov 3, 2014 at 11:49 AM, James Bromberger <james@rcpt.to> wrote:
>>
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>> Hello all,
>>
>> We're fast approaching the big freeze[1], so I wanted to start to summarise
>> up the status of the EC2 AMIs.
>>
>> Thanks to Eric Evans, Python-Boto 2.33 hit testing in the last few days.
>> This represents a huge step forward from Wheezy's current 2.3.0, bringing
...
>> - - support for sub-interfaces via a DHCP script (and metdata server info)
>> - - AWS CLI (package awscli) version 1.4.2 (upstream is 1.5.4; differences
>> are here [6]) is installed
>
> Great work James!
>
>> With the rise of HVM replacing PVM in the AWS environment, and every new
>> instance providing more and more memory, I'm going to suggest a few things.
>>
>>
>> First, many providers are now signalling the end of i386 images, and I am
>> going to propose that we do similar for Jessie. Wheezy has supported
>> multiarch[7], so i386 binaries can run on an amd64 image.
>
> Agreed on dropping 32-bit images. They haven't been worth the trouble for some
> time.
No need to drop 32-bit images. There are also no need to let all
packages support 32-bit installed kernels. There can be differences
between x86 and amd64 installations. And yes, there are occations
when 32-bit support in amd64 is not good enough. Like when the CPU
doesn't support the amd64 instructions needed to boot Linux.
>> Second, with all current-generation instance types being HVM capable, I am
>> going to suggest we no longer generate Paravirtualisation images, . The
>> current-generation instance types are generally cheaper and/or more resource
>> (memory, CPU) than the previous-generation PVM-only instances, so users
>> pretty quickly want only HVM amd64 across their entire set of instances.
>
> There are still reasons to run the older generation instances, so I'd
> be hesitant to completely drop them before AWS announces the
> retirement of the HW. That said, I don't know how much work is
> involved in building/maintaining them. Nor do I have inside
> information on when support for the 1st generation HW will be
> retired.
Same argument can be said about x86 and amd64.
Anyway, thanks for the awaesome work!
/Jackson
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