Introduction

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.

Announcement: https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org/t/lxc-6-0-5-lts-has-been-released/24438

Highlights of this point release:

• 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.

Announcement: https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org/t/lxcfs-6-0-5-lts-has-been-released/24437

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.

Announcement: https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org/t/incus-6-0-5-lts-has-been-released/24445

Highlights of this point release:

• Support for memory hotplug in VMs
• Reworked logging subsystem
• SNAT support on complex network forwards
• 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.

Find out more at: https://www.sovereign.tech