Incus is a modern, secure and powerful system container and virtual machine manager.
Community Linux Containers unveiled a few days ago the launch of the second version of the projector Incus 0.2, version in which most of the changes made in LXD 5.19 are included, in addition to introducing some additional features and improvements, such as the support for virtual machines, as well as cluster support for migration from LXD, among other things.
For those who do not know about Incus, you should know that this is a fork of LXD that was born due to Canonical's decision to develop LXD separately As a corporate project and the Linux Containers community that oversaw the development of LXD, I created Incus with the goal of providing an independent, community-driven alternative.
Incus provides tools for centralized management of containers and virtual machines Deployed on a single host or in a cluster of multiple servers. The project is implemented as a background process that accepts requests over the network via REST API and supports various storage backends (directory tree, ZFS, Btrfs, LVM), live migration of running containers. one machine to another and tools to store image containers.
What's new in Incus 0.2?
In this new version of Incus 0.2 that is presented, one of its main new features is the added support for virtual machines for storage creation based on NVME technology, since a new configuration parameter has been added «io.bus» to indicate the type of disk, which by default is set to «virtio-scsi«, although it is mentioned that if the value is changed to «nvme«, the virtual machine drive will be visible as an NVME SSD.
Another change that stands out in this new version is the new utility added «lxd-to-incus", which aims to automate the transition from LXD to Incus and in which it has also been added support for LXD 5.19 version and provides the ability to migrate not only individual hosts, but also LXD clusters. This mentions that anyone with LXD version 4.0 and higher (up to 5.19) can now easily move to Incus by installing Incus just by running «lxd-to-incus»
In addition to this, Incus 0.2 presents a new image requirement for unprivileged containers, in which the parameter «requirements.privileged", which can be set to "false" to prohibit use of the image in privileged containers. The configuration, for example, could be used for NixOS distribution images that are currently incompatible with privileged containers.
On the other hand, it highlights the server side custom volume copy, since in Incus 0.2 the implementation of the mode to create copies of partitions on the server side has been moved from LXD, which significantly speeds up partition copy operations by eliminating data redirection through the client. The command line tool automatically detects support for this and uses it when available.
Of the other changes that stand out from this new version:
- Statically linked sets were provided for ARM64 systems.
- Fix patch related to zfs block configuration disconnection
- Implemented the authorizer for the TLS driver.
- Added a flag to operations to skip event listener configuration.
- Fix in storage volume recovery test
- Syslog test fixed
- Removed UI tabs
- Added incus config trust command to missing subcommands
- Removed excess LXD references
- Update for .tar.xz
- Added feature to update storage volume node
Last but not least, it is worth mentioning that the Incus project also plans to address some conceptual errors made during the development of LXD that previously could not be fixed without breaking backwards compatibility.
Finally yes you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details in the following link