Incus was created just over two months ago by Aleksa Sarai, forking the LXD project shortly after Canonical took it over and kicked out all community maintainers from it. It aims at providing the same great system container and virtual machine management, clustering, … as LXD, but in a more community driven and distribution-agnostic way.
Over those two months, the focus has been on taking ownership of the code base, doing a lot of housekeeping work, effectively modernizing the code base, removing a number of less used or Ubuntu-specific features and developing tooling that will allow the project to keep up with LXD while also allowing it to grow its own features separate of LXD.
From a technical standpoint, it’s very similar to LXD 5.18 and supports migrating all data from LXD 4.0 or newer (up till 5.18). From a community standpoint, it’s the beginning of a new great project, run by the original LXD maintainers along with Aleksa and that has already received a number of contributions from various community members!
You can easily try Incus 0.1 for yourself with our online demo.
Separately from the Incus project, I’m also personally providing packages for Incus to Debian and Ubuntu users through my company, Zabbly. And I’m naturally able to provide paid support, development and migration services to anyone who would like that!
My open source work can also be sponsored directly through Github Sponsors.
Now to go back to fixing bugs and processing all the great user feedback so far!
One very neat feature we had back when LXD was hosted on the Linux Containers infrastructure was the ability to try it online. For that, we were dynamically allocating a LXD container with nested support, allowing the user to quickly get a shell and try LXD for a bit.
This was the first LXD experience for tens of thousands of people and made it painless to discover LXD and see if it’s a good fit for you.
With the move of LXD to Canonical, this was lost and my understanding is that for LXD, there’s currently no plan to bring it back.
Enter Incus
Now that Incus is part of the Linux Containers project, it gets to use some of the infrastructure which was once provided to LXD, including the ability to provide a live demo server!
Quite a few things have changed on the infrastructure side since the LXD days.
For one thing, the server code has seen some substantial updates, porting it to Incus, adding support for virtual machines, talking to remote clusters, making the configuration file easier to read, adding e-mail notifications for when users leave feedback and more!
On the client side, the code was also ported from the now defunct term.js over to the actively maintained xterm.js. The instructions were obviously updated to fit Incus too.
But the exciting part is that we’re no longer using nested containers run inside of one large mostly stateless VM, that had to be rebuilt daily for security reasons. No, we’re now spawning individual virtual machines against a remote Incus cluster!
Each session now gets an Ubuntu 22.04 VM for a duration of 30 minutes. Each VM is running on an Incus cluster with a few beefy machines available. They use the Incus daily repository along with both my kernel and zfs builds.
Resource wise, we’re also looking at a big upgrade, moving from just 1 CPU, 256 MB of RAM and 5 GB of slow disk to a whopping 2 CPU, 4 GB of RAM and 50 GB of NVME storage!
The end result is that while the session startup time is a bit longer, up to around 15s from just 5s, the user now gets a full dedicated VM with fast storage and a lot more resources to play with. The most notable change this introduces is the ability to play with Incus VMs too!
Next steps
The demo server is currently using Incus daily builds as there’s no stable Incus release yet. This will obviously change as soon as we have a stable release!
Other than that, the instructions may be expanded a bit to cover more resource intensive parts of Incus, making use of the extra resources now available.
Ever since announcing Incus, one of the most asked questions was when would we have packages available. And that’s even before we have our first stable release out!
This week I finally dedicated some time to getting us automated daily builds which will now be available moving forward for Debian 11, Debian 12, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
Similar to my kernel and ZFS builds, those will be built for both x86_64 and aarch64.
Once we do have a stable release of Incus out, a separate repository for stable builds will also be added. For now, this is only daily builds which are put out there without any testing, so here by dragons!
Instructions
The up to date installation instructions can be found here:
It’s very similar to the kernel and ZFS builds and is signed by the same GPG key, so it’s easy to have all of them on the same system and benefit from the testing being done across them.
NOTE: Once installed, you’ll have to run incusd init, at least for another few more days while we work on rolling out the new incus admin init that will replace it.
As mentioned in today’s YouTube livestream, those packages are very bare at this point.
They do include all the bits needed for Incus, from LXC and LXCFS, to Cowsql, to QEMU and EDK2, but the system integration is still pretty minimal at this stage. There needs to be some work to ensure that things like bash completion works properly, update the systemd units to do proper socket activation, tweak the migration tool to cover more use cases and in general ensure that this is stable across the board.
But having packages at all, unblocks a lot of work we’ve been wanting to do on our CI as we now can just deploy a clean system, add the repository and install a daily build without having to manually build everything from source!
So expect the package to get a whole lot better over the coming days, leading to packaging that will be suitable for the first Incus release when the time comes for that.
It’s now been two months since I left my position at Canonical and went freelance! A lot of things have now all fallen into place to the point where it almost feels like having a normal work routine again 🙂
Kernel and ZFS builds
As mentioned in an earlier post, after over a year of rolling my own kernels and manually installing them on all my systems, I’ve decided to spend a bit of time automating the whole process and putting in place a proper build and publishing pipeline.
The result is mainline kernel builds that are updated and tested weekly, made available as Debian packages for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Debian 11 and Debian 12 users. You can find those here:
And because I’m still a ZFS user and need a recent ZFS build to go along those mainline kernels, I’ve also started building up to date ZFS packages here:
I’m now running those on a mix of Intel, AMD and Arm systems from single board computers to large AMD EPYC systems and everything has been very smooth so far!
Incus
Most of my time has otherwise been spent working on Incus, the community LXD fork.
We’re almost done with the initial set of breaking changes, primarily removing outdated or irrelevant features, making some CLI changes, …
Recently I’ve been focusing on re-organizing the various Go packages in the codebase, trying to get all of those out of the way before I spend any amount of time working on the tooling to import LXD changes into Incus.
And I’ve also been spending some time working on the migration tool to transition users from LXD to Incus. There’s still some work to be done, but we’ve converted a dozen systems or so with minimal additional work needed!
Next up for Incus is going to be some initial packages that will be available for Ubuntu and Debian users, making it a lot easier to automate testing and for early adopters to give it a try!
Currently the hope is for an initial release of Incus towards the end of September or early October.
Youtube
Last month I mentioned that I created a new YouTube channel, though at the time, there was no content on it yet. This has since changed!
I’ve been trying to do a live stream per week, showcasing some of the work going on with Incus. So far, there’s a video showing me manually switching my main desktop machine from LXD to Incus, another on fixing some smaller issues and the last one showcases the creation of the aforementioned LXD to Incus migration tool.
I’ll probably try to keep the weekly live stream going for a little while, at least until we have an initial Incus release out and can work on shorter, more thought-through videos showcasing various aspects of Incus.
Using Debian again
With the work to get my kernel and ZFS builds to be available to both Ubuntu and Debian users, along with the recent release of Debian 12, I’ve decided to give Debian a go on my main desktop machine.
I’ve been an Ubuntu user since 2004 so it had been almost 20 years since I last used Debian for more than a 30 minutes test in a container. Overall, things went pretty smoothly. I don’t really need all that much to have a functional system and found that starting from a minimal installation made it pretty simple to get my system up and running with as few packages and random daemons running as possible.
The bulk of my day to day work happens in VMs, containers and on remote servers, so I’ve not really noticed any visible difference so far. I imported my home directory and all my Incus data from my Ubuntu install and after re-installing all my usual packages, I’ve effectively got a system that feels identical to my old Ubuntu install, minus the nagging to get me to use Ubuntu ESM 🙂
I’m still an Ubuntu Core Developer and I’ll still be using Ubuntu on a number of other machines, but it’s definitely been great to see where Debian got after all these years and I expect I’ll be using it more in the years to come!
Sponsorship
As mentioned last month, I’ve setup a business here in Canada so I can easily handle contract work, consultation, trainings, … And I’m quite happy that I’ve already gotten to do a fair amount of that with quite a bit more expected to come over the next few months!
If there’s some project that you think I may be able to help you with, you can let me know at info@zabbly.com
On top of that, I’ve gotten into the Github Sponsorship program too. This makes it pretty easy to receive both one-off and recurring contributions from users or organizations that appreciate the open source work I’ve been doing and want to help out!
Conclusion
Two months in, quite a lot has happened, quite a lot has changed from my old day to day, more management-focused work. I’m happy that a normal day for me now involves a lot more working on code, problem solving and interacting with other passionate members of the open source community and a lot less recurring meetings and JIRA updates 🙂
I’m excited about what’s coming over the next few months, especially getting an initial release of Incus out the door and to users as well as some other exciting projects I’m only starting to work on now!
For the past year or so, I’ve increasingly been using mainline Linux kernels on my various servers and eventually laptop and desktop machines too.
That was transitioning from Ubuntu’s generic kernel which I feel has sadly decreased in quality over time. The Ubuntu kernel includes a lot of backported fixes and occasionally, those backports go bad, resulting in missing commits, introducing bugs and regressions. Unfortunately the way the Ubuntu kernel is built, tested and published comes with a lot of delays, making fixing such regressions often take weeks if not months (depending on whether security updates show up in between).
So I started taking the latest stable bugfix release of the mainline kernel, generate a configuration that’s very close to an Ubuntu generic kernel, cherry-pick a few small changes that aren’t upstream yet and then build that and push it to my machines.
That’s been working surprisingly well so far! Those kernels haven’t been perfect, I did catch a couple of regressions, but as I’m now working with a mainline kernel, performing a bisect, identifying the offending commit and getting it resolved upstream is very easy, with a revert taking an hour or so at most and a fix taking just a few days to hit mainline.
Making them available to everyone
Up until now, I’ve been manually building those kernels from an internal git repository, building them directly on a couple of servers (amd64 and arm64) and then transferring the resulting .debs directly to my other machines.
That works, but it’s not a particularly clean build environment and installing kernels that way doesn’t really scale!
That’s why I’ve now spent a few days moving it all to Github and a proper package repository.
For building, I’m using some self-hosted Github runners on my local Incus cluster so I can have access to beefy Debian and Ubuntu builders on both amd64 and arm64.
The result is a repository that contains both amd64 and arm64 builds for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and Debian 12. This is all automatically built and automatically imported into the repository with the only manual step being to update the “linux-zabbly” meta-package after testing the new kernel on some test systems.
Using them
Installation instructions can be found here: https://github.com/zabbly/linux#installation Just keep in mind that you’ll most likely have to disable UEFI SecureBoot as those kernel builds aren’t signed unlike those that come directly from your distribution.
The kernel will be updated once a week unless something major happens requiring an intermediate update. It will roll from one kernel version to the next after it has received its first bugfix release which has so far been a good way to avoid some of those initial regressions!
ZFS
I use ZFS quite extensively to store local containers and VMs on Incus. The Ubuntu kernel ships with a built-in version of ZFS but to keep the Zabbly kernel clean, I opted not to do that.
This currently contains ZFS 2.2rc3 and will be updated with new release candidates and eventually the 2.2 stable release. The decision to ship 2.2 rather than stick to 2.1 is motivated by ZFS 2.2 properly handling VFS idmap shift, a critical feature for Incus.
That repository includes both openzfs-zfs-dkms, the package providing the kernel driver as well as the usual set of tools used to manage zfs, openzfs-zfsutils.
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