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LXC 1.1.0 release announcement

30.01.2015
The LXC team is pleased to announce the release of LXC 1.1.

This release will be supported until January 2016 or 2 months after the next release of LXC,
whichever comes last.

If you need a long-term supported version of LXC for use in production, we still strongly recommend
you stick to LXC 1.0 which is supported with frequent stable releases until April 2019.

While not strictly required, it is recommended that LXC 1.1 be used with cgmanager 0.35 (or higher)
and lxcfs 0.5 (or higher).

Highlights

LXC 1.1 introduces checkpoint/restore support for containers through CRIU.
This allows to serialize the container running state to disk, for live migration or for later local restoration
of the container.

Support for running systemd as the init system inside the container was also greatly improved
and should now work by default both for privileged and unprivileged containers when combined
with lxcfs and a recent systemd.

Init scripts have now all been updated to provide the same feature set, which means that a lxcbr0 bridge
with a DHCP and DNS server (dnsmasq) is now the default for anyone using LXC.
We currently provide init scripts for systemd, sysvinit and upstart.

This release was made possible by contributions from 84 developers.

New features

  • lxc-autostart: New -A/--ignore-auto flag (starts all containers)
  • lxc-ls: New "interface" field
  • centos/fedora: Added a root_password_expired environment variable (defaults to yes)
  • oracle: Allow installing from arbitrary yum repositories (including media)
  • oracle: Add Oracle Linux 7 support
  • lxc-ls: Allow filtering containers by group even without --fancy
  • core: Add support for qcow2 images (through qemu-img)
  • lxc-autostart: Add support for the NULL group (any container with lxc.start.auto set to 1 but without a group)
  • core: Track an unexpanded version of the configuration as well as comments (improves formatting of the save configuration)
  • opensuse: Switch to using common configurations
  • core: Allow lxc.cap.keep be set to none
  • archlinux: Switch to using common configurations
  • ubuntu: use btrfs subvolumes and snapshots when available
  • seccomp: Set a default seccomp profile for all distros (blocks dangerous syscalls)
  • core: Add support for Openvswitch bridges
  • core: Add support for lxc.environment (sets extra environment variables)
  • init: Add identical support of systemd, upstart and sysvinit scripts
  • core: Add support for checkpoint and restore of containers using CRIU
  • core: Add a new aa_allow_incomplete flag to allow container startup with partial apparmor support
  • lxc-top: Now a C binary installed by default (was a lua script)
  • API: Addition of attach_interface and detach_interface
  • lxc-device: Now a C binary installed by default (was a python3 script)
  • lxc-config: Now supports querying lxc.cgroup.(use|pattern)
  • core: Add new lxc.init_cmd config option to override the default init command (/sbin/init/)
  • lxc-start-ephemeral: Add new --cdir option (copy-on-write mounts)
  • opensuse: Support multiple releases
  • core: lxc.include now allows including directories (includes all the files with a .conf suffix)
  • core: A new common.conf.d configuration directory is available for users and packages to drop configuration snippets to be applied to all containers
  • core: The container_ttys environment variable is now set by LXC

Change in behavior

  • lxc-create now requires be passed (-t), use "none" for the old behavior.
  • snapshots are now stored in the container's directory
  • lxc.arch for PER_LINUX32 is now output as i686
  • lxc-execute: lxc-init is now bind-mounted in the container if it can't be found
  • lxc-start: containers now start daemonized by default
  • core: pivot_root is now done without the use of lxc.pivotdir, as a result this option is now considered deprecated and will be removed in upcoming releases.
  • core: with the switch to daemonized containers by default, close-all-fds is also now the default.
  • core: lxc.autodev was reworked, it no longer uses /dev/lxc, instead mounting a tmpfs directly on the container's /dev, it also now works with unprivileged containers
  • core: lxc.autodev is now on by default (can be overridden with lxc.autodev=0)
  • core: lxc.kmsg is now disabled by default (can be overridden with lxc.kmsg=1)
  • core: clear_config_item now exclusively affects lists (lxc_list) entries. set_config_item should be used for anything else.
  • templates: All templates now use lxc.mount.auto = cgroup:mixed proc:mixed sys:mixed (safe default configuration)

Downloads

The release tarballs may be found on our download page and we expect most distributions
will very soon ship a packaged version of LXC 1.1.0, unless they decide to stick to the long term 1.0 release.

Should you be interested in individual changes or just looking at the detailed development history,
our master branch is on GitHub.