Requirements

Go

Incus requires Go 1.25 or higher and is only tested with the Golang compiler.

We recommend having at least 2GiB of RAM to allow the build to complete.

Kernel requirements

The minimum supported kernel version is 6.12.

Incus requires a kernel with support for:

  • Control Groups (blkio, cpuset, devices, freezer, memory and pids)

  • Namespaces (cgroup, ipc, pid, mount, net, user and uts)

  • Seccomp

  • Native Linux AIO (io_setup(2), etc.)

The following optional features also require extra kernel options:

  • AppArmor

  • CRIU (exact details to be found with CRIU upstream)

  • SELinux

As well as any other kernel feature required by the LXC version in use.

LXC

Incus requires LXC 6.0.0 or higher with the following build options:

  • apparmor (if using Incus’ AppArmor support)

  • seccomp

  • selinux (if using Incus’ SELinux support)

LXCFS is strongly recommended to properly report resource consumption inside the container.

OCI

To run OCI containers, Incus currently relies on skopeo for registry interactions.

QEMU

For virtual machines, QEMU 8.2 or higher is required.

When using virtiofsd, only the Rust rewrite of virtiofsd is supported.

OVS/OVN

When using Incus with OVN networks, the minimum versions of OVS and OVN are:

  • OVS: 2.15.0

  • OVN: 23.03.0

Additional libraries (and development headers)

Incus uses cowsql for its database, to build and set it up, you can run make deps.

Incus itself also uses a number of (usually packaged) C libraries:

  • libacl1

  • libcap2

  • libuv1 (for cowsql)

  • libsqlite3 >= 3.25.0 (for cowsql)

Make sure you have all these libraries themselves and their development headers (-dev packages) installed.