Requirements

Go

LXD requires Go 1.16 or higher and is only tested with the golang compiler.

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

Kernel requirements

The minimum supported kernel version is 5.4.

LXD requires a kernel with support for:

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

  • Seccomp

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, pids and net_prio)

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

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

LXC

LXD requires LXC 4.0.0 or higher with the following build options:

  • apparmor (if using LXD’s apparmor support)

  • seccomp

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

QEMU

For virtual machines, QEMU 4.2 or higher is preferred. Older versions, as far back as QEMU 2.11 have been reported to work properly, but support for those may accidentally regress in future LXD releases.

Additional libraries (and development headers)

LXD uses dqlite for its database, to build and setup it, you can run make deps.

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

  • libacl1

  • libcap2

  • libuv1 (for dqlite)

  • libsqlite3 >= 3.25.0 (for dqlite)

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