AWS gives older EC2 instances a legacy lifeline Amazon Web Services has shown it's willing to operate legacy workarounds for some customers of its elastic compute cloud (EC2). Last week the cloud colossus issued an announcement titled "AWS Nitro System now supports previous generation of instances." Nitro is AWS's SmartNIC-based tech that it uses to move plumbing jobs off …
> So they virtualised their virtualised platform?
Not really. They made their new virtualised platform compatible with their old one.
Specifically, David Woodhouse completed the work to allow the Linux kernel's kvm hypervisor to support Xen hypercalls.
See:
* https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-5.12-KVM-Changes
* https://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_5.12
* https://lore.kernel.org/kvm/20210111195725.4601-5-dwmw2@infradead.org/T/
I'm confused. It's extremely unlikely that any software is going to notice a basic x86 instance upgrade. If anything is stuck on a very old instance type, it's likely because it's using the "Launch Configuration" instance descriptor that's no longer supported. The last thing you want to do is test your luck adding a Nitro mount to an old template that will likely self-destruct when touched.
The modern "Launch Configuration" self-destructs too, but at least it has versioning.
there are a number of reasons an instance might notice
- the kernel doesn't have modern drivers.
- the kernel is built for a paravirtual hypervisor
- the kernel doesn't support newer CPUs.
- the application has race conditions and will lose on a newer CPU
i would be willing to consider continuing to use m1.medium in exchange for not having to do the testing.
