Requirements

Go

Incus requires Go 1.22 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 5.4.

Incus requires a kernel with support for:

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

  • Seccomp

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

The following optional features also require extra kernel options:

  • Namespaces (user and cgroup)

  • AppArmor (including Ubuntu patch for mount mediation)

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

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

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

LXC

Incus requires LXC 5.0.0 or higher with the following build options:

  • apparmor (if using Incus’ AppArmor support)

  • seccomp

To run recent version of various distributions, including Ubuntu, LXCFS should also be installed.

OCI

To run OCI containers, Incus currently rely on both skopeo and umoci. Both tools should be available in the user’s PATH.

QEMU

For virtual machines, QEMU 6.0 or higher is required.

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.