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Incus 6.0 LTS has been released¶

Apr 4, 2024

Introduction¶

It's with great pride and pleasure that the Incus team is announcing the release of Incus 6.0 LTS!

Incus is a modern system container and virtual machine manager developed and maintained by the same team that first created LXD. It's released under the Apache 2.0 license and is run as a community led Open Source project as part of the Linux Containers organization.

Incus provides a cloud-like environment, creating instances from premade images and offers a wide variety of features, including the ability to seamlessly cluster up to 50 servers together.

It supports multiple different local or remote storage options, traditional or fully distributed networking and offers most common cloud features, including a full REST API and integrations with common tooling like Ansible, Terraform/OpenTofu and more!

This is a major milestone for Incus as it marks our first release with extended support, suitable for use in production environments where monthly feature releases aren't suitable.

It joins LXC 6.0 LTS and LXCFS 6.0 LTS in wrapping up this round of LTS releases.

Just like its sister projects, Incus 6.0 LTS will be supported until June 2029.
The first 2 years will feature bug and security fixes as well as minor usability improvements, delivered through occasional point releases (6.0.x). After that initial two years, Incus 6.0 LTS will move to security only maintenance for the remaining of its 5 years of support.

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

Enjoy!

PS: Incus was made possible thanks to the work of over 70 individual contributors!

Changes since Incus 0.7¶

Swap limits for containers¶

The existing limits.memory.swap configuration key for containers has been extended to also allow for byte amounts.

This now makes its behavior be as follows:

• limits.memory.swap=true => Container memory may be swapped (default)
• limits.memory.swap=false => Container shouldn't get swapped (minimal swappiness)
• limits.memory.swap=256MiB => Container can use up to 256MiB of swap space (in addition to its memory limit set through limits.memory)

Example (cgroup2 system):

stgraber@dakara:~$ incus launch images:debian/12 d12 -c limits.memory=1GiB
Launching d12
stgraber@dakara:~$ incus exec d12 bash
root@d12:~# free -m
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available           
Mem:            1024          21         983           0          19        1002
Swap:              0           0           0
root@d12:~#
exit
stgraber@dakara:~$ incus config set d12 limits.memory.swap=128MiB
stgraber@dakara:~$ incus exec d12 bash
root@d12:~# free -m      
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:            1024          21         983           0          19        1002
Swap:            128           0         128
root@d12:~#
exit

New shell completion mechanism¶

With this release, we complete the migration away from a hand-maintained bash completion script and over to generate completion scripts directly in our command line tool.

Completion profiles are now available for:

• bash
• fish
• powershell
• zsh

The profile can be retrieved by calling incus completion <shell> (e.g. incus completion bash) though this will generally be done by packagers as part of the Incus package build process.

Creation of external bridge interfaces¶

The managed network bridge configuration syntax for external interfaces, bridge.external_interfaces has now been extended to allow for the creation and attachment of VLAN interfaces.

stgraber@dakara:~$ incus network set incusbr0 bridge.external_interfaces=vlan60/enp35s0/60
stgraber@dakara:~$ ip link show dev vlan60
269: vlan60@enp35s0: <NO-CARRIER,BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP> mtu 1500 qdisc noqueue master incusbr0 state LOWERLAYERDOWN mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 00:23:a4:01:01:6f brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
stgraber@dakara:~$ incus network unset incusbr0 bridge.external_interfaces
stgraber@dakara:~$ ip link show dev vlan60
Device "vlan60" does not exist.
stgraber@dakara:~$

Live-migration of VMs with attached disks (from remote storage)¶

As an extension to our ever improving VM live-migration support, virtual-machines with additional disks attached to them which come from a "remote" storage pool (ceph or lvmcluster) will now be live-migratable alongside the virtual machine.

No user action is required for this to happen, you'll simply now notice that virtual machines that previously would have refused to live-migrate through either a manual incus move --target or a cluster evacuation will now happily live-migrate to another server.

System information in incus info --resources¶

A new System section is now visible in incus info --resources

stgraber@dakara:~$ incus info --resources
System:
  UUID: 88eecd60-34fc-9f97-48f5-fc34979f48f6
  Vendor: ASUS
  Product: System Product Name
  Family: To be filled by O.E.M.
  Version: System Version
  SKU: SKU
  Serial: System Serial Number
  Type: physical
  Chassis:
      Vendor: Default string
      Type: Desktop
      Version: Default string
      Serial: Default string
  Motherboard:
      Vendor: ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC.
      Product: ProArt B550-CREATOR
      Serial: 210382121300122
      Version: Rev X.0x
  Firmware:
      Vendor: American Megatrends Inc.
      Version: 2803
      Date: 04/28/2022

 [snip...]

Having access to this information is particularly useful in clustered environments where incus info --resources can be used with the --target argument to query specific servers, check that all firmwares are up to date and check what machines one is dealing with.

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

USB devices in incus info --resources¶

A new USB devices section is now visible in incus info --resources

stgraber@dakara:~$ incus info --resources
[snip...]

USB devices:
  Device 0:
    Vendor: Intel Corp.
    Vendor ID: 8087
    Product: AX200 Bluetooth
    Product ID: 0029
    Bus Address: 1
    Device Address: 6
  Device 1:
    Vendor: Corsair
    Vendor ID: 1b1c
    Product: H150iRGBPROXT
    Product ID: 0c22
    Bus Address: 1
    Device Address: 5
  Device 2:
    Vendor: ASUSTek Computer, Inc.
    Vendor ID: 0b05
    Product: AURA LED Controller
    Product ID: 19af
    Bus Address: 1
    Device Address: 2
  Device 3:
    Vendor: Realtek Semiconductor Corp.
    Vendor ID: 0bda
    Product: TX42C500
    Product ID: 4933
    Bus Address: 5
    Device Address: 2
  Device 4:
    Vendor: Blue Microphones
    Vendor ID: b58e
    Product: Yeti Stereo Microphone
    Product ID: 9e84
    Bus Address: 5
    Device Address: 15
  Device 5:
    Vendor: Yubico.com
    Vendor ID: 1050
    Product: YubiKey FIDO+CCID
    Product ID: 0406
    Bus Address: 5
    Device Address: 29
  Device 6:
    Vendor: Logitech, Inc.
    Vendor ID: 046d
    Product: HD Pro Webcam C920
    Product ID: 082d
    Bus Address: 5
    Device Address: 17
  Device 7:
    Vendor: Powerware Corp.
    Vendor ID: 0592
    Product: Powerware UPS
    Product ID: 0002
    Bus Address: 7
    Device Address: 2

That information comes in very handy when adding a USB device to a container or virtual machine.

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

Changes since LXD 5.0 LTS¶

For those coming from the LXD 5.0 LTS release, here is a concise list of what to expect as far as features having been removed and what has been added both in subsequent LXD feature releases and then through Incus.

Feature removal¶

A number of features that were Ubuntu or Canonical specific were removed as part of the creation of the Incus project. A number of legacy APIs have also been removed at the same time.
You'll find the full list in the Incus 0.1 announcement.

Highlights:

• shiftfs has been removed in favor of VFS idmap shifting
• Canonical Candid authentication has been removed in favor of OpenID Connect
• Canonical RBAC authorization has been removed in favor of OpenFGA
• Canonical MAAS network integration has been removed (under/unused feature)
• Ubuntu Fan networking has been removed in favor of OVN
• core.trust_password has been removed in favor of trust tokens for security reasons

Feature additions¶

Here are a few highlights from the many new features introduced within the 2 years since the release of LXD 5.0 LTS.

• API
• Abiltiy to list objects across projects (?all-projects=true or --all-projects in CLI)
• JWT authentication (derived from TLS certificate)
• Instances
• Placement scriptlet
• Instance rebuilding
• READY instance state
• NUMA aware instance placement (limits.cpu.nodes)
• (CONTAINER) sysinfo system call interception (security.syscalls.intercept.sysinfo)
• (VM) CPU hotplug support (limits.cpu)
• (VM) "Online" live-migration support
• (VM) AMD SEV support (security.sev)
• (VM) Legacy (BIOS) support (security.csm)
• (VM) Ability to hot-plug directories backed disks
• (VM) NVME and VirtIO block I/O bus options
• Integrations
• Grafana Loki log and event streaming
• ACME / Let's Encrypt certificate generation/signing
• OpenID Connect authentication support
• OpenFGA authorization support
• Image server management tool
• Networking
• Network integrations (OVN interconnect support)
• Load-balancers (OVN)
• IPAM data export API
• VDPA for offloaded OVN networks
• Storage
• Clustered LVM storage driver
• Storage buckets (S3 API)
• ISO image custom volumes
• ZFS delegation
• ZFS block mode

Complete changelog¶

Here is a complete list of all changes since Incus 0.7:

Documentation¶

The Incus documentation can be found at:
https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/docs/main/

Installation¶

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.

Linux packages¶

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/6.0.0

Winget package for the Incus client¶

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

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

Migrating from LXD¶

A lxd-to-incus migration tool allows for in-place migration from LXD to Incus.
It's been tested with LXD versions as low as 4.0 LTS and as high as the latest LXD 5.21 bugfix release.

It allows for a very quick migration from LXD over to Incus, automatically checking for potential conflicts ahead of time.

More details can be found here: https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/docs/main/howto/server_migrate_lxd/

Support¶

Incus 6.0 LTS will be supported for a total of 5 years (until June 2029).

During the first 2 years, new point releases will be issued including a mix of bug and security fixes as well as some minor usabiltiy improvements. After that initial 2 years (after Incus 7.0 LTS is released), Incus 6.0 LTS will transition to security fixes only for the remaining 3 years.

This matches what we've been doing for our other projects (LXC and LXCFS) over the past 10 years.

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