I think I might have mentioned that, a couple of weeks ago, I bought an Intel VPS from Linveo. Now I have purchased an upgrade from 2 to 4 cores. The price for the upgraded VPS is $4.07/month with a coupon code.
Here is a Yabs on the newly upgraded VPS to show that it seems to work great with Debian. Next I am going to try @cmeerw's kindly contributed NetBSD 11 RC2 Minimum image which is available in the Linveo Control Panel.
NetBSD 11.0_RC2 (GENERIC) #0: Wed Mar 4 21:02:00 UTC 2026
Welcome to NetBSD!
This is a release candidate for NetBSD.
Bug reports: https://www.NetBSD.org/support/send-pr.html
Donations to the NetBSD Foundation: https://www.NetBSD.org/donations/
We recommend that you create a non-root account and use su(1) for root access.
x86# date
Fri Mar 13 20:06:27 UTC 2026
x86# uptime
8:06PM up 4 mins, 1 user, load averages: 0.00, 0.01, 0.00
x86#
I don't understand why, but it seems the OpenBSD install mentioned just above malfunctioned yesterday evening. I couldn't log in any more.
This morning, the above reported 7.9-beta amd64 ISO install no longer worked.
On amd64 I tried 7.7 and 7.8 in addition to the 7.9-beta snapshot ISO, all of which stopped booting after
scsibus8 at softraid0: 256 targets
Despite the amd64 possible failures this morning, i386 seems to work fine.
OpenBSD 7.9-beta (GENERIC.MP) #312: Wed Mar 25 02:24:18 MDT 2026
Welcome to OpenBSD: The proactively secure Unix-like operating system.
Please use the sendbug(1) utility to report bugs in the system.
Before reporting a bug, please try to reproduce it with the latest
version of the code. With bug reports, please try to ensure that
enough information to reproduce the problem is enclosed, and if a
known fix for it exists, include that as well.
openbsd$ uname -a
OpenBSD openbsd.metalvps.com 7.9 GENERIC.MP#312 i386
openbsd$ date
Wed Mar 25 20:02:24 UTC 2026
openbsd$ uptime
8:02PM up 2 mins, 1 user, load averages: 0.41, 0.21, 0.08
openbsd$
Additionally, vmcontrol.linveo.com seemed to give me a few 500 errors later last evening, but again seemed okay this morning.
Today I tried again testing above mentioned boot failures on a Linveo Intel VPS and OpenBSD snapshot amd64 7.9-beta.
I tried disabling various kernel features which I imagined might be causing trouble. I tried both the bsd and bsd.rd kernels.
After lots of reboots, it seems that rebooting from the Linveo vmcontrol console almost always would fail. This succeeded twice in a few dozen tries over a period of several days.
What seems to work more reliably ( = hasn't yet failed) was to enable web VNC, reboot from the Linveo vmcontrol panel, watch the boot fail inside the VNC console, and then
(1) reboot again from the Linveo vmcontrol panel with VNC console running
(2) type a space into the VNC console to stop the boot process (see screenshot below)
(3) reboot from inside the VNC console (without involving the Linveo vmcontrol panel) (see screenshot below)
(4) let the reboot proceed normally (don't type anything next time the boot> prompt appears).
So far . . . the above procedure seems to give a reliable boot:
OpenBSD 7.9-beta (GENERIC.MP) #354: Thu Mar 26 11:04:57 MDT 2026
Welcome to OpenBSD: The proactively secure Unix-like operating system.
Please use the sendbug(1) utility to report bugs in the system.
Before reporting a bug, please try to reproduce it with the latest
version of the code. With bug reports, please try to ensure that
enough information to reproduce the problem is enclosed, and if a
known fix for it exists, include that as well.
openbsd# date
Thu Mar 26 23:01:31 UTC 2026
openbsd# uname -a
OpenBSD openbsd.metalvps.com 7.9 GENERIC.MP#354 amd64
openbsd# uptime
11:01PM up 2 mins, 2 users, load averages: 0.30, 0.17, 0.07
openbsd#
OpenBSD's man 8 boot_amd64 at https://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-5.9/boot_amd64.8 makes a distinction between cold and warm starts. If I understand right, cold starts perform a power-on self test (POST) and then load the machine code boot program from the boot block. Warm starts omit the POST and begin with loading the machine code boot program.
It's clear from the description of the header the OpenBSD man 8 boot page at https://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-5.9/boot.8 that the reboot inside VNC in the above screenshot, which shows the same header as the man page, is happening inside step 6 of the boot program:
The header line
> >> OpenBSD/amd64 BOOT [x.xx]
is displayed to the active console, where x.xx is the version number of the boot program, followed by the
> boot>
prompt, which means you are in interactive mode and may enter commands.
Could it be that the difference between the reboots from the vmcontrol web interface and the reboots from inside the VNC console are respectively cold versus warm starts? Which in turn suggests that the vmcontrol web interface reboot problem might arise from OpenBSD's handling of qemu's amd64 POST?
As of this writing, the VPS seems still to be running okay:
openbsd# date; uptime
Fri Mar 27 03:26:31 UTC 2026
3:26AM up 4:26, 1 user, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
openbsd#
Comments
I think I might have mentioned that, a couple of weeks ago, I bought an Intel VPS from Linveo. Now I have purchased an upgrade from 2 to 4 cores. The price for the upgraded VPS is $4.07/month with a coupon code.
Here is a Yabs on the newly upgraded VPS to show that it seems to work great with Debian. Next I am going to try @cmeerw's kindly contributed NetBSD 11 RC2 Minimum image which is available in the Linveo Control Panel.
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
Seems to work great!
First glance. . . .
Thanks @cmeerw!
Thanks @linveo! 
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
Hello!
OpenBSD 7.9-beta snapshot from https://cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/snapshots/amd64/ now seems to boot on a Linveo Intel KVM VPS.
dmesg behind the spoiler!
Best!
Tom
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
Good morning!
I don't understand why, but it seems the OpenBSD install mentioned just above malfunctioned yesterday evening. I couldn't log in any more.
This morning, the above reported 7.9-beta amd64 ISO install no longer worked.
On amd64 I tried 7.7 and 7.8 in addition to the 7.9-beta snapshot ISO, all of which stopped booting after
scsibus8 at softraid0: 256 targetsDespite the amd64 possible failures this morning, i386 seems to work fine.
Additionally, vmcontrol.linveo.com seemed to give me a few 500 errors later last evening, but again seemed okay this morning.
Have fun!
Tom
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
Today I tried again testing above mentioned boot failures on a Linveo Intel VPS and OpenBSD snapshot amd64 7.9-beta.
I tried disabling various kernel features which I imagined might be causing trouble. I tried both the bsd and bsd.rd kernels.
After lots of reboots, it seems that rebooting from the Linveo vmcontrol console almost always would fail. This succeeded twice in a few dozen tries over a period of several days.
What seems to work more reliably ( = hasn't yet failed) was to enable web VNC, reboot from the Linveo vmcontrol panel, watch the boot fail inside the VNC console, and then
(1) reboot again from the Linveo vmcontrol panel with VNC console running
(2) type a space into the VNC console to stop the boot process (see screenshot below)
(3) reboot from inside the VNC console (without involving the Linveo vmcontrol panel) (see screenshot below)
(4) let the reboot proceed normally (don't type anything next time the boot> prompt appears).
So far . . . the above procedure seems to give a reliable boot:
Why? What is happening here?
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
OpenBSD's man 8 boot_amd64 at https://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-5.9/boot_amd64.8 makes a distinction between cold and warm starts. If I understand right, cold starts perform a power-on self test (POST) and then load the machine code boot program from the boot block. Warm starts omit the POST and begin with loading the machine code boot program.
It's clear from the description of the header the OpenBSD man 8 boot page at https://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-5.9/boot.8 that the reboot inside VNC in the above screenshot, which shows the same header as the man page, is happening inside step 6 of the boot program:
> >> OpenBSD/amd64 BOOT [x.xx]> boot>Could it be that the difference between the reboots from the vmcontrol web interface and the reboots from inside the VNC console are respectively cold versus warm starts? Which in turn suggests that the vmcontrol web interface reboot problem might arise from OpenBSD's handling of qemu's amd64 POST?
As of this writing, the VPS seems still to be running okay:
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!