Happy new year!

2023 was quite the busy year for me with a lot of changes to get used to, the biggest of which being my departure from Canonical and going self-employed.

While I don’t expect 2024 to be quite as exciting (and that’s a good thing), I certainly expect it to be busy! Here are some of what I look forward to in 2024:

Growing the Incus user base

Incus has been quickly picking up new users over the past few things, mostly thanks to the great work of our packagers as we now have proper packages and installations instructions for Arch, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, NixOS and Ubuntu with more coming soon!

It’s also easier than ever for folks using MacOS or Windows to interact with remote Incus servers thanks to Homebrew, Chocolatey and now WinGet packages.

We’re also starting recurring Incus Users meetings as a way to gather more valuable feedback for the development team as well as connecting users together!

Also worth noting for anyone still using LXD. We’ve started the process of phasing out access to the Linux Containers image server for LXD users. It’s something we’re doing pretty carefully and spread over a number of months, focusing on those users who have an easy migration path first.

FOSDEM 2024

FOSDEM 2024 is now just a month away and I’m very much looking forward to catching up with everyone! It’s going to be a busy weekend with us running both the Containers (Saturday) and Kernel (Sunday) devrooms, but I’m excited about all the great talks!

Schedule for containers devroom
Schedule for kernel devroom

We’re going to have Aleksandr, Christian, Tycho and myself representing LXC, LXCFS and Incus over there.

Incus LTS

As mentioned, Incus has seen a lot of interest lately and has picked up a pretty sizable user base already. But a lot more users and Linux distributions are waiting for a Long Term Support release to come out so they can use standardize on something that’s not quite as fast paced.

That’s going to happen towards the end of March or early April with the release of Incus 6.0 LTS.

The version comes as we always align all the LXC LTS projects during an LTS release, so we’ll be releasing LXC 6.0 LTS, LXCFS 6.0 LTS and Incus 6.0 LTS around the same time, with 5 years of security update across all of them, 2 years of which will see bugfixes and minor improvements also be included.

LPC 2024

In the second half of the year, we’ll be gathering in Vienna this time for the annual Linux Plumbers Conference where I hope we’ll have another edition of the containers micro-conference.

This is always a great opportunity to catch up in person with other low-level Linux developers and working together on exciting new kernel and userspace features.

Of particular interest to me is the continued work on improving user namespaces, VFS idmap mounts and new ways to handle resources limits in containers and CGroups.