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Incus 6.3 has been released¶

12 Jul 2024

Introduction¶

The Incus team is pleased to announce the release of Incus 6.3!

The highlight for this release is the initial support for running OCI application containers.
This allows the use of common Docker/OCI images directly through Incus, with those containers living alongside our usual system containers and virtual machines!

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

Enjoy!

New features¶

Initial support for OCI application containers¶

Incus is now capable of accessing application container registries such as the Docker Hub, retrieve images, convert (flatten) them for use by Incus and then create a working containers from them.

This is still very early in our OCI container support and there will likely be quite a few gaps that will need to be filled in based on user feedback, but for many simple cases where people are currently running both Docker and Incus on the same system or where they've been using Docker inside of an Incus container just to run a single piece of software, Incus should now be able to handle that directly.

All of the Incus container configuration options, whether resource limits, system call interception, ... all apply to those containers too. They're also all run in the same safe container environment as our system containers.

stgraber@dakara:~$ incus remote add docker https://docker.io --protocol=oci
stgraber@dakara:~$ incus launch docker:mysql mysql \
> -c environment.MYSQL_DATABASE=wordpress \
> -c environment.MYSQL_USER=wordpress \
> -c environment.MYSQL_PASSWORD=wordpress \
> -c environment.MYSQL_RANDOM_ROOT_PASSWORD=1
Launching mysql

stgraber@dakara:~$ incus list mysql
+-------+---------+----------------------+------------------------------------------+-----------------+-----------+
| NAME  |  STATE  |         IPV4         |                   IPV6                   |      TYPE       | SNAPSHOTS |
+-------+---------+----------------------+------------------------------------------+-----------------+-----------+
| mysql | RUNNING | 172.17.250.26 (eth0) | 2602:fc62:c:250:216:3eff:fefa:468 (eth0) | CONTAINER (APP) | 0         |
+-------+---------+----------------------+------------------------------------------+-----------------+-----------+

stgraber@dakara:~$ incus launch docker:wordpress wordpress \
> -c environment.WORDPRESS_DB_HOST=172.17.250.26 \
> -c environment.WORDPRESS_DB_USER=wordpress \
> -c environment.WORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD=wordpress \
> -c environment.WORDPRESS_DB_NAME=wordpress
Launching wordpress

stgraber@dakara:~$ incus list wordpress
+-----------+---------+-----------------------+-------------------------------------------+-----------------+-----------+
|   NAME    |  STATE  |         IPV4          |                   IPV6                    |      TYPE       | SNAPSHOTS |
+-----------+---------+-----------------------+-------------------------------------------+-----------------+-----------+
| wordpress | RUNNING | 172.17.250.119 (eth0) | 2602:fc62:c:250:216:3eff:fe61:c1fc (eth0) | CONTAINER (APP) | 0         |
+-----------+---------+-----------------------+-------------------------------------------+-----------------+-----------+
stgraber@dakara:~$

Baseline CPU definition within clusters¶

One big limitation of Incus' live migration logic so far has been that it expected all servers within a cluster to run identical CPUs. Should the CPU differ between two systems, the live migration would fail or cause crashes later on.

That's because Incus would always expose all the CPU flags from the machine it runs on.
This is good to get the maximum amount of performance on a standalone system, but in a heterogeneous cluster, this doesn't quite work.

With this release, Incus will now automatically compute the set of common CPU flags across all servers for a given CPU architecture and use that as the CPU definition for any instance running with live-migration enabled (migration.stateful=true).

Filesystem support for io.bus and io.cache¶

The io.bus and io.cache options have been around for VM disks for a little while now.
With io.bus offering the option of virtio-scsi, virtio-blk or nvme and io.cache allowing for none, writeback or unsafe caching.

Those config keys are now also supported when passing in filesystems rather than disks.
Their values in such cases are a bit different with io.bus being one of auto (default), 9p or virtiofs and io.cache supporting none (default), metadata or unsafe.

This effectively allows controlling exactly how a filesystem is exposed to the VM and then tweaking caching behavior when using virtiofs.

Improvements to incus top¶

Incus 6.2 introduced the new incus top command.
With this release, we're making it more useful by having it work against remote servers, properly support clustered environments and also handling projects.

+---------+---------------+-------------+-----------+-----------+
| PROJECT | INSTANCE NAME | CPU TIME(S) |  MEMORY   |   DISK    |
+---------+---------------+-------------+-----------+-----------+
| default | incus-ui      | 63.40       | 12.76MiB  | 1.54GiB   |
+---------+---------------+-------------+-----------+-----------+
| default | kernel-test   | 1865037.10  | 578.01MiB | 32.84GiB  |
+---------+---------------+-------------+-----------+-----------+
| default | speedtest     | 84.10       | 23.14MiB  | 400.12MiB |
+---------+---------------+-------------+-----------+-----------+
| default | win11         | 1865.11     | 15.51GiB  |           |
+---------+---------------+-------------+-----------+-----------+
| demo    | mysql         | 6.77        | 464.20MiB | 276.62MiB |
+---------+---------------+-------------+-----------+-----------+
| demo    | wordpress     | 1.81        | 53.66MiB  | 386.62MiB |
+---------+---------------+-------------+-----------+-----------+
| vpn     | vpn-dev       | 102.97      | 36.83MiB  | 412.00MiB |
+---------+---------------+-------------+-----------+-----------+
| vpn     | vpn-lab       | 57.29       | 27.03MiB  | 347.75MiB |
+---------+---------------+-------------+-----------+-----------+
Press 'd' + ENTER to change delay
Press 's' + ENTER to change sorting method
Press CTRL-C to exit

Delay: 10s
Sorting Method: Alphabetical

CPU flags in server resources¶

The resources API which is used to expose a lot of details about the machine's hardware configuration has now been updated to expose the CPU flags.

This was required to implement the baseline CPU feature mentioned previously.
The new data can be found in the API directly and is provided for each CPU core.

stgraber@dakara:~$ incus query /1.0/resources | jq .cpu.sockets[0].cores[0].flags -c
["fpu","vme","de","pse","tsc","msr","pae","mce","cx8","apic","sep","mtrr","pge","mca","cmov","pat","pse36","clflush","mmx","fxsr","sse","sse2","ht","syscall","nx","mmxext","fxsr_opt","pdpe1gb","rdtscp","lm","constant_tsc","rep_good","nopl","xtopology","nonstop_tsc","cpuid","extd_apicid","aperfmperf","rapl","pni","pclmulqdq","monitor","ssse3","fma","cx16","sse4_1","sse4_2","x2apic","movbe","popcnt","aes","xsave","avx","f16c","rdrand","lahf_lm","cmp_legacy","svm","extapic","cr8_legacy","abm","sse4a","misalignsse","3dnowprefetch","osvw","ibs","skinit","wdt","tce","topoext","perfctr_core","perfctr_nb","bpext","perfctr_llc","mwaitx","cpb","cat_l3","cdp_l3","hw_pstate","ssbd","mba","ibrs","ibpb","stibp","vmmcall","fsgsbase","bmi1","avx2","smep","bmi2","erms","invpcid","cqm","rdt_a","rdseed","adx","smap","clflushopt","clwb","sha_ni","xsaveopt","xsavec","xgetbv1","xsaves","cqm_llc","cqm_occup_llc","cqm_mbm_total","cqm_mbm_local","clzero","irperf","xsaveerptr","rdpru","wbnoinvd","cppc","arat","npt","lbrv","svm_lock","nrip_save","tsc_scale","vmcb_clean","flushbyasid","decodeassists","pausefilter","pfthreshold","avic","v_vmsave_vmload","vgif","v_spec_ctrl","umip","pku","ospke","vaes","vpclmulqdq","rdpid","overflow_recov","succor","smca","fsrm","debug_swap"]

Unified image support in incus-simplestreams¶

The incus-simplestreams tool which is used to manage a static web server hosting Incus images using the simplestreams index format has now been updated to support not just split images but also unified images.

Incus images can either be made of two files, one containing the metadata files and one containing the rootfs or root disk, or a single tarball which contains both the metadata and then the rootfs or root disk as a directory/file inside of that single tarball.

To add a unified image to the server, simply call incus-simplestreams add with a single file rather than the usual two.

Completion of libovsdb transition¶

For the past 4-5 releases, we've been slowly migrating more and more logic from direct calls to the ovs-vsctl, ovn-nbctl and ovn-sbctl command line tools to instead using a native OVSDB client.

This work is now complete and Incus no longer requires any of the OVS/OVN tools be present on the system to interact with OVN.

The new logic keeps a persistent connection to the relevant databases, significantly reducing the time and CPU overhead needed to interact with OVN. This persistent connection will also allow receiving and reacting to events directly from OVN, something which wasn't possible with the previous approach.

Notice for packagers¶

This release introduces OCI support which requires the presence of both skopeo and umoci as commands in the PATH for the feature to work.

Additionally, the INCUS_OVMF_PATH environment variable was renamed to INCUS_EDK2_PATH to avoid the use of the architecture-specific name (arm64 uses AAVMF) and instead rely on the generic name of the firmware.

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/6.3.0

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