My linode is old (just passed it's 11th birthday; oh how it's grown from the small linode64... getting a linode is one of the best choices I ever made!). The root disk is a full disk; there's no partition table or boot sector. And, yeah, it's a 32bit distro (CentOS 5... I know; I know... I'll have to rebuild as CentOS 7 some day!)

What would I need to do to convert this to boot KVM using my distro kernel?

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Rgds
Stephen
(Linux user since kernel version 0.11)

To use the kernel provided by your distro using KVM I guess you would need to do this:

* Install whatever package in your distro provides the kernel.
* Make sure you never use disk names in a hardcoded way. For example, if you have /dev/xvdb somewhere in /etc/fstab
and KVM makes the disk to become /dev/sdb, you will have a problem. Use UUID= everywhere.
* Create a grub1-style menu.lst which is suitable for your system. The easy way to do that is to install the grub-legacy package itself if it's available.
* In the Linode dashboard, change the boot method to pv-grub-x86_32 (as you said your system was 32-bit).
* If your (still) Xen system boots this way, congratulations, you should be ready to switch to KVM using your own kernel, as you asked.
* Open a support ticket to ask that your linode is changed to KVM.
* Select grub-legacy as the boot method in the Linode dashboard. The external grub-legacy will read your menu.lst and will load and boot your kernel.

Note: I have not tested the KVM linodes myself, so take everything I said with a grain of salt...

Edit: I have edited this post after realizing that pv-grub follows grub1 syntax.

Tested it today.

You may happily forget about grub-legacy. It is a lot easier if you switch to KVM as the first step. Installing grub2 and your distro-provided kernel may be done after that.