Yeah, it definitely needs it. Historically it was intentional as my own servers were all on 8.04, but the last of those moved 12.04 last year.
I think there's already a 12.04 buildbot, so perhaps 14.04 would be better? I do prefer sticking with an LTS.
It'll need to move to 64-bit given the hosting environment, at least for the kernel. I could do 32-bit userspace via multiarch if keeping a 32-bit buildbot in the mix is attractive.