G’day,

We’ll be performing a small change to every Hosted Guest (VM / VPS / etc) that we operate. This will involve changing the presented silicon from being a QEMU/KVM type to passing through the host node’s real CPU type.

The key benefits here are getting as many functions and instruction sets enabled natively, without needing to manually configure this per-guest on top of the QEMU default emulation type. For instance, we already have security mitigation flags enabled and routed into guests, however this change will cover that by default as well as other sets like AVX - which is starting to become mandatory for system upgrades like for MongoDB, CL, etc.

• Simple re: Instruction Sets: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instruction_set
• Detailed re: AVX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Vector_Extensions

For each guest, we will amend the hypervisor config for it, then shut-down guest, then power-on guest. Done!

If you’ve any questions about these works, please let us know. Our goal is to complete it early in the weekend.

Cheers,
Merlot Digital