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Incus 6.1 has been released¶

07.05.2024

Introduction¶

The Incus team is pleased to announce the release of Incus 6.1!

This is our first feature release following Incus 6.0 LTS.
As a reminder, feature releases are only supported until the next one comes out, usually on a monthly cadence. Critical production environments should stay on the LTS release instead.

In this release, we have a lot of small quality of life improvements throughout. A lot of those being first contributions from students of the University of Texas at Austin. Expect a lot more of those in Incus 6.2!

As usual, you can try it for yourself online: https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/try-it/

Enjoy!

New features¶

Creation of complex ZFS pools¶

The source key when creating storage pools using our zfs driver has now been extended to allow the creation of more complex vdevs including striping, mirroring, raidz1 and raidz2.

Example syntax:

• /dev/sda,/dev/sdb (striping, RAID0)
• mirror=/dev/sda,/dev/sdb (mirroring, RAID1)
• raidz1=/dev/sda,/dev/sdb,/dev/sdc,/dev/sdd,/dev/sde (raidz1, RAID5)
• raidz2=/dev/sda,/dev/sdb,/dev/sdc,/dev/sdd,/dev/sde (raidz2, RAID6)

This combined with the data from incus info --resources will now make it possible to deploy complex storage pools all through the API.

Listing of profiles across projects¶

As part of an effort to add cross-project querying of all API objects, it is now possible to list profiles across all projects.

At the API level, this is support for all-projects=true on the /1.0/profiles API endpoint, at the CLI level this looks like:

stgraber@dakara:~$ incus profile list --all-projects
+-----------------+---------+---------------------------------------+---------+
|     PROJECT     |  NAME   |              DESCRIPTION              | USED BY |
+-----------------+---------+---------------------------------------+---------+
| default         | default | Default Incus profile                 | 10      |
+-----------------+---------+---------------------------------------+---------+
| demo            | default | Default Incus profile                 | 12      |
+-----------------+---------+---------------------------------------+---------+
| lab-cgroup      | default | Default Incus profile                 | 2       |
+-----------------+---------+---------------------------------------+---------+
| lab-lvm-cluster | default | Default Incus profile                 | 3       |
+-----------------+---------+---------------------------------------+---------+
| lab-ovn-ic      | default | Default Incus profile                 | 10      |
+-----------------+---------+---------------------------------------+---------+
| vpn             | default | Default Incus profile for project vpn | 2       |
+-----------------+---------+---------------------------------------+---------+

This feature was contributed by University of Texas at Austin students.

Listing of network zones across projects¶

As part of an effort to add cross-project querying of all API objects, it is now possible to list network zones across all projects.

At the API level, this is support for all-projects=true on the /1.0/network-zones API endpoint, at the CLI level this looks like:

stgraber@dakara:~$ incus network zone list --all-projects
+---------+--------------------------+-------------+---------+
| PROJECT |           NAME           | DESCRIPTION | USED BY |
+---------+--------------------------+-------------+---------+
| default | default.demo.example.net |             | 0       |
+---------+--------------------------+-------------+---------+
| foo     | foo.demo.example.net     |             | 0       |
+---------+--------------------------+-------------+---------+

This feature was contributed by University of Texas at Austin students.

Additional functions made available to the instance placement scriptlet¶

Incus supports customizing instance placement through the use of a python-like script called a scriptlet. When used, the scriptlet is exposed some information about the instance, potential targets and the reason for the request.

On top of those arguments, a number of functions are also exposed to those scriptlets.
That includes the ability to log information, the function to actually make the final placement decision and the ability to fetch some basic load information about the candidate servers.

Now this is being extended through two additional functions:

• get_instances(location, project) => []api.Instance
• get_cluster_members(group) => []api.ClusterMember

Those are all optional arguments, so they can be used to list all instances or all cluster members as well, allowing a lot of flexibility in placement scripts.

Documentation: https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/docs/main/explanation/clustering/#instance-placement-scriptlet
This feature was contributed by University of Texas at Austin students.

Feeding YAML to create commands in the incus CLI¶

A number of Incus commands already support reading a YAML file through their standard input as part of a create command, but this isn't very consistent nor well documented, we're now in the process of making things consistent and this release now has support for reading a YAML object definition in the following commands:

• incus create & incus launch
• incus cluster group create
• incus network acl create
• incus network forward create
• incus network integration create
• incus network load-balance create
• incus network peer create
• incus network zone create
• incus profile create
• incus project create
• incus snapshot create
• incus storage create
• incus storage bucket create

For all of those, YAML data similar to what's showed in the matching show command can be fed through stdin at creation time to configure the object as part of its creation.

Customizable columns in the incus CLI¶

Something else we're slowly making consistent in the CLI is the ability to choose what columns to display in our list commands.

This has also been expanded with the following commands now supporting it:

• incus cluster list
• incus config trust list
• incus image list
• incus list
• incus profile list
• incus project list
• incus storage volume list
• incus storage volume snapshot list
• incus warning list

This feature was contributed by University of Texas at Austin students.

migration.stateful configuration key for containers¶

The migration.stateful configuration key has been expanded to also apply to containers now.

It is now required to have it set to true to access any feature requiring the recording and restoration of process state in containers (CRIU), which basically means stateful stop, stateful snapshots and live migration.

This change is unlikely to affect many users as CRIU's ability to live-migrate or perform stateful dumps of Incus containers is extremely limited and so generally seen as not functional.
The change does have the benefit of providing clearer errors to users who accidentally request an action which would make use of CRIU.

This feature was contributed by University of Texas at Austin students.

Stateless ACLs on OVN¶

A new allow-stateless action has now been added to Incus' network ACL rules.

As the name implies, this leads to the creation of a stateless rule inside of OVN.
This is great for situations where stateful rules may come with a heavy cost and where a matching stateless rule is possible (e.g. DNS interactions).

This feature was contributed by University of Texas at Austin students.

Instance uptime (startup time) tracking¶

A new StartedAt field has been added to the instance state data.
This exposes the timestamp at which the instance was started and is also available in incus info and incus list.

stgraber@dakara:~$ incus info speedtest | grep Started
Started: 2024/04/29 11:03 EDT

stgraber@dakara:~$ incus list -cnstU
+-------------+---------+-----------------+----------------------+
|    NAME     |  STATE  |      TYPE       |      STARTED AT      |
+-------------+---------+-----------------+----------------------+
| centos3     | STOPPED | CONTAINER       |                      |
+-------------+---------+-----------------+----------------------+
| centos4     | STOPPED | CONTAINER       |                      |
+-------------+---------+-----------------+----------------------+
| fga         | STOPPED | VIRTUAL-MACHINE |                      |
+-------------+---------+-----------------+----------------------+
| incus-ui    | RUNNING | CONTAINER       | 2024/05/07 16:54 EDT |
+-------------+---------+-----------------+----------------------+
| kernel-test | RUNNING | VIRTUAL-MACHINE | 2024/05/07 15:43 EDT |
+-------------+---------+-----------------+----------------------+
| keybase     | STOPPED | CONTAINER       |                      |
+-------------+---------+-----------------+----------------------+
| ovn-test    | RUNNING | VIRTUAL-MACHINE | 2024/05/07 15:43 EDT |
+-------------+---------+-----------------+----------------------+
| speedtest   | RUNNING | CONTAINER       | 2024/04/29 11:03 EDT |
+-------------+---------+-----------------+----------------------+
| void        | STOPPED | VIRTUAL-MACHINE |                      |
+-------------+---------+-----------------+----------------------+
| win11       | STOPPED | VIRTUAL-MACHINE |                      |
+-------------+---------+-----------------+----------------------+

This feature was contributed by University of Texas at Austin students.

Improvement to network handling during evacuation¶

When performing a cluster evacuation, all the networks will now be shut down at the end of the evacuation and only started back as part of the restoration action.

This is particularly useful in OVN environments as it ensures that an evacuated Incus server doesn't act as a virtual router for any of the defined networks, making system shutdown/reboot less likely to cause network glitches.

This feature was contributed by University of Texas at Austin students.

Complete changelog¶

Here is a complete list of all changes in this release:

Documentation¶

The Incus documentation can be found at:
https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/docs/main/

Packages¶

There are no official Incus packages as Incus upstream only releases regular release tarballs. Below are some available options to get Incus up and running.

Installing the Incus server on Linux¶

Incus is available for most common Linux distributions. You'll find detailed installation instructions in our documentation.

https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/docs/main/installing/

Homebrew package for the Incus client¶

The client tool is available through HomeBrew for both Linux and MacOS.

https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/incus

Chocolatey package for the Incus client¶

The client tool is available through Chocolatey for Windows users.

https://community.chocolatey.org/packages/incus/6.1.0

Winget package for the Incus client¶

The client tool is also available through Winget for Windows users.

https://winstall.app/apps/LinuxContainers.Incus

Support¶

At this early stage, each Incus release will only be supported up until the next release comes out. This will change in a few months as we are planning an LTS release to coincide with the LTS releases of LXC and LXCFS.

Community support is provided at: https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org
Commercial support is available through: https://zabbly.com/incus
Bugs can be reported at: https://github.com/lxc/incus/issues