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Incus 6.2 has been released¶

31.05.2024

Introduction¶

The Incus team is pleased to announce the release of Incus 6.2!

This release contains the second wave of changes contributed by students of the University of Texas at Austin and a few other features and improvements.

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

Enjoy!

New features¶

New incus top command¶

A new incus top command was added. This builds on top of Incus' built-in OpenMetrics endpoint and allows for a refreshing view of the instance list, including CPU, memory and disk usage.

+---------------+-------------+-----------+-----------+
| INSTANCE NAME | CPU TIME(S) |  MEMORY   |   DISK    |
+---------------+-------------+-----------+-----------+
| foo           | 6.73        | 12.44MiB  | 341.88MiB |
+---------------+-------------+-----------+-----------+
| speedtest     | 32.79       | 23.84MiB  | 373.50MiB |
+---------------+-------------+-----------+-----------+
| v1            | 67130.91    | 254.54MiB | 1.25GiB   |
+---------------+-------------+-----------+-----------+
Press 'd' + ENTER to change delay
Press 's' + ENTER to change sorting method
Press CTRL-C to exit

Delay: 5s
Sorting Method: Alphabetical

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

System load information in resources API¶

A new section was added to the resources API to expose server load information (1min, 5min, 10min) as well as total process count.

This is particularly useful for placement and auto-balancing logic as it allows for getting a good glimpse at how busy the various servers are solely from the Incus API.

stgraber@castiana:~$ incus info --resources
System:
  UUID: 05006c9c-7863-ee11-9e1b-224425600022
  Vendor: Framework
  Product: Laptop 13 (AMD Ryzen 7040Series)
  Family: Laptop
  Version: A5
  SKU: FRANDGCP05
  Serial: FRANDGCPA5340500AZ
  Type: physical
  Chassis:
      Vendor: Framework
      Type: Notebook
      Version: A5
      Serial: FRANDGCPA5340500AZ
  Motherboard:
      Vendor: Framework
      Product: FRANMDCP05
      Serial: FRANMDCPA534040120
      Version: A5
  Firmware:
      Vendor: INSYDE Corp.
      Version: 03.05
      Date: 03/29/2024

Load:
  Processes: 519
  Average: 0.80 0.77 0.71

[snip...]

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

Ability to query access information for instances and projects¶

Two new APIs were added to allow querying the access list of a project or even a specific instance.

This integrates with our OpenFGA support and provided a sufficiently recent version of OpenFGA, will show you exactly who can access an instance and what role they have.

stgraber@castiana:~$ incus info --show-access foo
- identifier: stgraber@stgraber.org
  role: admin
  provider: openfga

stgraber@castiana:~$ incus project info --show-access default
- identifier: stgraber@stgraber.org
  role: admin
  provider: openfga

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

Forceful deletion of projects¶

When dealing with a lot of busy projects, deleting them can become rather frustrating due to having to track down and delete everything they contain in the right order.

To address that, we now have incus project delete --force which will instruct Incus itself to delete everything in the correct order before deleting the project itself.

This is obviously an extremely dangerous thing to do. The command line tool will always ask for confirmation that you indeed want this project fully gone.

stgraber@castiana:~$ incus project delete demo
Error: Only empty projects can be removed.

stgraber@castiana:~$ incus project delete demo --force
Remove demo and everything it contains (instances, images, volumes, networks, ...) (yes/no): yes
Project demo deleted

New get_project scriptlet function¶

For those using our scriplet instance placement feature (instances.placement.scriptlet), a new function has now been added, get_project.

This allows retrieving all the details (api.Project) for a specific project and is particularly useful if you want project restrictions or limits to impact the placement decision.

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

Querying objects across projects¶

Incus has long supported listing all instances regardless of projects.
Then recently this was extended to also cover storage volumes, images, profiles, network zones and operations.

With Incus 6.2, all remaining object collections now support this, adding:
- Storage buckets
- Networks
- Network ACLs

The CLI was updated to match, so all list commands interacting with objects that can be project-specific now also support --all-projects.

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

PCI devices in incus info --resources¶

All PCI devices are now included in the incus info --resources output.
In the past, only those devices that were included in the GPU or disk sections were readily available.

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

Improved alias handling in incus-simplestreams¶

The initial incus-simplestreams implementation would automatically generate our standard looking alias, basically DISTRIBUTION/RELEASE/VARIANT but that's not suitable for all environments and so you now have two new arguments to incus-simplestreams add:

• --no-default-alias to disable the above alias
• --alias to define a custom alias (can be passed multiple times)

Feeding YAML to create commands in the incus CLI¶

This work was started with Incus 6.1 and is now complete.

All create commands as well as incus init and incus launch now support reading an initial configuration as YAML from stdin.

This enables much easier scripting of complex deployments.

Customizable column lists in the CLI¶

Another piece of work which started with Incus 6.1 and is now complete.

All CLI commands that have a list function now support the --column/-c flag.

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

More automatically generated documentation¶

Not something that should be generally noticeable to most users, but we've been slowly moving our documentation to be generated directly from comments in our code, limiting the risk of it getting outdated or out of sync.

With Incus 6.2, the following are now generated in that way:

• Network zones
• Image restrictions
• Kernel limits
• Devices
  • disk
  • unix-block
  • unix-char
  • unix-hotplug
  • usb

This work 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/6.2.0

Winget package for the Incus client¶

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

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

Support¶

Monthly feature releases are only supported up until the next release comes out. Users needing a longer support length and less frequent changes should consider using Incus 6.0 LTS instead.

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