32-bit VE 1.5.0?

[VulcanRidr]

Happy Friday, everyone,

I am trying to migrate my Proxmox install from a Dell PE 1850 to an HP DL360. Both have 3.2 GHz dual Xeons in them, but apparently the HP doesn't have 64 bit. The Dell does, but no VT-X. Which is fine, because I am only doing OpenVZ.

I found the 32-bit Proxmox page at http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Install_Proxmox_VE_on_Debian_Lenny_on_32-Bit_Processor but the site linked in that page is for 1.4.0. Is there a more current (e.g. 1.5.0 release) of the 32-bit stuff?

If not, can I anticipate any problems migrating containers from 1.5.0 to 1.4.0? I suspect that is a big yes, because I'm running kernel 2.6.24, and it was impossible to migrate containers from the 2.6.32-enabled openvz installation to a 2.6.18 to a 2.6.26 one.

Suggestions?

Thanks,
--vr

 

[VulcanRidr]

Bump...Any ideas on this?

 

[chronos]

You can use 2.6.32 openvz kernel so you don't have to migrate to 2.6.24 or 2.6.18 kernel.

 

[alain]

Hi VulcanRidr,

I may be wrong, bu it seems to me very unlikely that a HP DL360 with Xeon 3.2 GHz has no 64 bit support. I have myself rather old Dell PE1850 (some are 6 years old) with Xeon 3 GHz that have 64 bit support.

What is the exact model of your processors ?

Alain

 

[VulcanRidr]

You can use 2.6.32 openvz kernel so you don't have to migrate to 2.6.24 or 2.6.18 kernel.

I'm running 2.6.24 on my 64-bit install, because 2.6.32 was KVM-only. On the straight Debian side, I believe the -openvz kernels went from 2.6.18 -> 2.6.26 -> 2.6.32, and on Debian/stable, 2.6.26-1 and 2.6.26-2 are the only options. I'm not sure what changed between 2.6.26 and 2.6.32 on the testing box I had set up (I suspect the openvz module versions), but it was not downward compatible.

 

[VulcanRidr]

Hi VulcanRidr,

I may be wrong, bu it seems to me very unlikely that a HP DL360 with Xeon 3.2 GHz has no 64 bit support. I have myself rather old Dell PE1850 (some are 6 years old) with Xeon 3 GHz that have 64 bit support.

What is the exact model of your processors ?

Alain

That is what I would have figured. So imagine my dismay when I booted up the proxmox cd in the DL360 and it told me that it wasn't 64 bits.

As for the the CPU information (and the reason I hate intel chips), there is nothing specifically stating what model of Xeon it is. Both have the following in /proc/cpuinfo:

Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 3.20GHz

Both are cpu family 15, but the HP is model 2, stepping 5, while the Dell is model 4, stepping 10.

dmidecode shows the following "major" differences:

• Voltage is 1.4v on the Dell and 1.5v on the HP
• External clock is 800MHz on the Dell and 533 MHz on the HP.
• The Dell has the following additional lines for the cpu that the HP doesn't:
  • Core Count: 1
  • Core Enabled: 1
  • Thread Count: 2
  • Characteristics:
  • 64-bit capable

So I guess the HP really isn't 64 bit.

So what is the best approach to building a 32-bit Proxmox installation?

Thanks,
--vr

 

[alain]

I am afraid you are right.

I did some research. It seems you can determine if your processor is 64 bits by searching flag lm in cat /proc/cpuinfo.

For example, this PE 1850 (5 years old, Xeon 3 GHz) has 64 bits support :
# cat /proc/cpuinfo |grep flags
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx lm constant_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl cid cx16 xtpr

because it contains lm (long mode, 64 bits).

See for example this link :
http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-how-to-find-if-processor-is-64-bit-or-not/

But yours is likely without, as this link seems to indicate :
http://serverfault.com/questions/74499/poweredge-2650-is-it-64-bit-capable

You have to be cautious with Intel. Unlike AMD, they mixed in the same family processor with or without 64 bit support, virtualization, and so on. But I thought all Xeon since at least 5 years were 64 bits. Your HP DL360 is certainly 6 years old.

I fear it will be difficult to use this server to host OpenVZ VMs with Proxmox (only 64 bits, if I am right)... Do you have other choice ?

Alain

 

[VulcanRidr]

I am afraid you are right.

I did some research. It seems you can determine if your processor is 64 bits by searching flag lm in cat /proc/cpuinfo.

For example, this PE 1850 (5 years old, Xeon 3 GHz) has 64 bits support :
# cat /proc/cpuinfo |grep flags
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx lm constant_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl cid cx16 xtpr

because it contains lm (long mode, 64 bits).

See for example this link :
http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-how-to-find-if-processor-is-64-bit-or-not/

But yours is likely without, as this link seems to indicate :
http://serverfault.com/questions/74499/poweredge-2650-is-it-64-bit-capable

You have to be cautious with Intel. Unlike AMD, they mixed in the same family processor with or without 64 bit support, virtualization, and so on. But I thought all Xeon since at least 5 years were 64 bits. Your HP DL360 is certainly 6 years old.

Thank you for researching this, Alain. I really dislike Intel for doing this and making it so difficult to determine which chip does what.

I fear it will be difficult to use this server to host OpenVZ VMs with Proxmox (only 64 bits, if I am right)... Do you have other choice ?

OpenVZ is not the problem, since all of the VMs I am running on proxmox came off of a straight Debian install running OpenVZ. The problem I had there was that I was using a front end called WebVZ, which was ruby based. I needed to migrate the containers to a different platform to repurpose the server they were on, and I tried installing OpenVZ and WebVZ to the new server. Unfortuantely, there was some issue with the Ruby API that wouldn't allow me to install all of the dependencies for WebVZ. So on a whim, I stuck my Proxmox CD in, and it installed. I have really come to enjoy the feature set of Proxmox, and I would like to install it on the HP. I guess I will have a go at building a 32-bit version with the provided packages (1.4.0), and if it doesn't work, figure out what to do next. Perhaps I will build a repo of 1.5.0 32-bit debs.

--vr

 

[pille]

from the wiki:

This repository is based on version 1.4 of PVE. I won't provide packages based on version 1.5, since most improvements in ChangeLog are KVM-targeted. I'll wait for 2.0 to come...

 

[Peter712]

has anyone seen or know of any updates to the 32bit proxmox?
I would like to see this updated to 2.0 as it is nice to use old hardware when able.

Peter

 

[pille]

not that i heard of.
my personal interest faded, since we're not using OpenVZ in favor for KVM.