Installing unsupported distributions
Some hints and tips that may be of use for those wishing to install a distribution or operating system that is currently unsupported by BitFolk.
Supported distributions
Many different Linux distributions are already supported by BitFolk and can be installed from the self-serve installer.
All modern Linux distributions should work under Xen however, so if you really want to run something else then it should be possible to do so.
Rescue VM
Your most useful tool for installing anything you like will be the Rescue VM. Since this is a full Linux distribution running from RAM, with access to your block devices and the Internet, you can in theory use it to install anything that is capable of booting under Xen.
Requirements
32 or 64-bit?
All BitFolk VMs have defaulted to 64-bit PVH mode for many years, but if you have a very old account this may not be the case. You should definitely pick 64-bit for any new install, and use PVH mode where your distribution supports it. PVH mode Xen guest support is usually enabled by default in the upstream kernel configuration.
Root filesystem
BitFolk uses Grub to boot your VPS. Our Grub binary looks inside your block device for a v2-style grub.cfg file, and for this reason the filesystem that you have your /boot directory on should be of a type that BitFolk's Grub supports. At the time of writing (February 2022) this includes ext2/3/4, xfs and btrfs. Normally you would put a single partition xvda1 on the first disk and use it for / with /boot inside it.
If you would like to use a different filesystem for your root that is fine—you can use whatever your kernel supports—but the partition that contains your /boot directory must be one of the ones that BitFolk supports. Therefore if doing this you'd want to put /boot as xvda1 and / elsewhere.
It is recommended to keep things simple and go with the usual / on xvda1 with /boot inside it. You can always add another disk and use it for LVM.
Swap
BitFolk provides the xvdb block device for use as swap. BitFolk recommends that you create a single partition on it and then use that (xvdb1) for swap. Your xvdb block device will always be 1GiB in size. If you feel you need more swap than this then you can add an additional swap file located on your regular storage.
Bootloader
You must have a Grub v2-style /boot/grub/grub.cfg in place. The easiest way to do that is to actually install Grub. The advantage of this is that your distribution probably has scripts in place to update your grub.cfg when you install new kernels.
If your distribution doesn't do this, or if you can't install Grub at all, that's OK. You don't actually need Grub installed, you just need the file /boot/grub/grub.cfg in place.