And as always, my company is offering commercial support on Incus, ranging from by-the-hour support contracts to one-off services on things like initial migration from LXD, review of your deployment to squeeze the most out of Incus or even feature sponsorship. You’ll find all details of that here: https://zabbly.com/incus
Donations towards my work on this and other open source projects is also always appreciated, you can find me on Github Sponsors, Patreon and Ko-fi.
Besides my regular open source contributions and running my own consulting business (Zabbly), I’m also the CTO and co-founder of an Open Source company called FuturFusion where I’ve been running Engineering for well over a year now.
My main focus over there has been building the FuturFusion Cloud stack, a completely open-source private cloud solution built around Incus. As part of that, our engineering team has been hard at work over the past year or so, improving Incus itself but also building a number of other projects from the ground up to make it easy to build and operate large scale Incus deployments.
Our stack is made of 4 core components:
Incus itself as the private cloud platform that runs virtual machines, system containers and application containers, with full clustering and multi-tenancy as well as support for a variety of storage and networking options to fit most environments.
IncusOS (shipping as HypervisorOS to our customers) that acts as our base layer Operating System image running on all physical servers as well as in the virtual machines that run our other components. It’s an immutable OS image based on Debian 13 and using systemd’s tooling to provide a safe boot experience and full disk encryption through the use of UEFI Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 modules. It uses an A/B update scheme, guaranteeing no variance in software between servers and an easy rollback mechanism should something go wrong. It’s completely locked down with API-only access and optional central management through Operations Center.
Operations Centerprovides an overview of an entire deployment, keeping track of all individual servers (running HypervisorOS), centrally managing all updates, handling Incus cluster creation and then acting as a global inventory of every Incus resource across all clusters.
Migration Manageris our migration tool which currently focuses on migrating from VMware (vCenter or standalone ESXi) over to Incus. It can connect to a large number of source VMware environments as well as target Incus clusters. It can easily keep track of hundreds of thousands of VMs that need to be migrated, making it easy to create migration batches and schedule those over weeks or months, running regular data pre-migration and finally completing the migration during scheduled downtime windows.
I recently took a bit of time away from customer deployments to record a video of how everything fits together, including an end to end lab deployment, starting from a pre-existing VMware environment and going all the way to having two Incus clusters running and the VMware VMs fully converted to Incus VMs.
In addition, for those interested in the security aspect of things, I gave a talk a few months back about IncusOS’ security story at the Linux Security Summit in Denver, Colorado. The recording of which has since been made publicly available.
Now our focus on the engineering front is primarily in fixing some filling a few remaining gaps as well as putting together up to date comprehensive documentation on IncusOS, Migration Manager and Operations Center. This will then make it easy for anyone to get started with those as well as hopefully attract more contributors to those projects.
On the topic of contributors, none of this would have been possible without the 112 individuals who contributed to the Incus project in the past year, thank you!
The Incus team is pleased to announce the release of Incus 6.17!
This release comes with an early CLI for IncusOS users, a couple of nice enhancements to OVN networking, more flexibility for cluster users and a couple of new instance options.
The highlights for this release are:
IncusOS management commands
Tunnel support on OVN networks
Control over out-of-memory priority
Override-able configuration and devices on backup import
database-client cluster role
Support for parent=none on OVN uplink networks
Cluster groups in configuration preseed
The full announcement and changelog can be found here. And for those who prefer videos, here’s the release overview video:
And as always, my company is offering commercial support on Incus, ranging from by-the-hour support contracts to one-off services on things like initial migration from LXD, review of your deployment to squeeze the most out of Incus or even feature sponsorship. You’ll find all details of that here: https://zabbly.com/incus
Donations towards my work on this and other open source projects is also always appreciated, you can find me on Github Sponsors, Patreon and Ko-fi.
The Incus team is pleased to announce the release of Incus 6.16!
This release brings in a new storage driver, the ability to install Windows VMs without having to rely on a repacked ISO and support for temporary storage in containers.
The highlights for this release are:
TrueNAS storage driver
USB CD-ROM handling for VMs
tmpfs and tmpfs-overlay disks for containers
Configurable console behavior in the CLI
The full announcement and changelog can be found here. And for those who prefer videos, here’s the release overview video:
And as always, my company is offering commercial support on Incus, ranging from by-the-hour support contracts to one-off services on things like initial migration from LXD, review of your deployment to squeeze the most out of Incus or even feature sponsorship. You’ll find all details of that here: https://zabbly.com/incus
Donations towards my work on this and other open source projects is also always appreciated, you can find me on Github Sponsors, Patreon and Ko-fi.
The Linux Containers project maintains Long Term Support (LTS) releases for its core projects. Those come with 5 years of support from upstream with the first two years including bugfixes, minor improvements and security fixes and the remaining 3 years getting only security fixes.
This is now the fifth round of bugfix releases for LXC, LXCFS and Incus 6.0 LTS.
LXC
LXC is the oldest Linux Containers project and the basis for almost every other one of our projects. This low-level container runtime and library was first released in August 2008, led to the creation of projects like Docker and today is still actively used directly or indirectly on millions of systems.
Fixes a regression introduced in LXC 6.0.4 which was causing some hooks to fail due to no-new-priv handling
Removed support for building with the bionic C library (Android) as it hadn’t been functional for a long time
Fixed handling of the container_ttys environment variable
Added support for both move and nosymfollow mount options
Improved testsuite coverage
LXCFS
LXCFS is a FUSE filesystem used to workaround some shortcomings of the Linux kernel when it comes to reporting available system resources to processes running in containers. The project started in late 2014 and is still actively used by Incus today as well as by some Docker and Kubernetes users.
There are no significant changes in this release, only a couple of minor changes to our CI scripts. We are still pushing a LXCFS update out to keep versions in sync between LXC, LXCFS and Incus, but this release is effectively identical to 6.0.4.
Incus
Incus is our most actively developed project. This virtualization platform is just over a year old but has already seen over 3500 commits by over 120 individual contributors. Its first LTS release made it usable in production environments and significantly boosted its user base.
CLI support for server-side filtering on all collections
Windows agent support for VMs
Improvements support to incus-migrate (extra disks, OVA, …)
SFTP API support on custom storage volumes
Support for publishing instances as split images
S3 upload of instances and volume backups
More flexible snapshot configuration
What’s next?
We’re expecting another LTS bugfix release for the 6.0 branches by the end of 2025. In the mean time, Incus will keep going with its usual monthly feature release cadence.
Thanks
This LTS release update was made possible thanks to funding provided by the Sovereign Tech Fund (now part of the Sovereign Tech Agency).
The Sovereign Tech Fund supports the development, improvement, and maintenance of open digital infrastructure. Its goal is to sustainably strengthen the open source ecosystem, focusing on security, resilience, technological diversity, and the people behind the code.
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