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Linux Containers: Incus Version 0.7 Now Available

Linux Containers Virtualization Incus LXD Homelab
Table of Contents

According to Incus’s latest update, version 0.7 has been released, bringing with it a plethora of new features and improvements, setting the stage for the upcoming Incus 6.0 LTS release. This version introduces significant enhancements, especially for those interested in server management, Linux, DevOps, and home lab environments. Here’s a detailed overview of the key features and improvements:

New Features #

  • Network Integrations: This feature allows Incus deployments to connect with external networks. Current implementation includes OVN interconnection for peering OVN networks with other Incus clusters or systems like OpenStack or Kubernetes.

  • Image Server Management Tool (incus-simplestreams): A new tool to simplify the setup of an Incus image server using simplestreams, facilitating image listing, adding, removing, and metadata file generation.

  • JSON Web Token (JWT) Authentication: Adds support for JWT bearer tokens for authentication, providing an alternative to TLS client certificates, especially useful behind reverse HTTP(S) proxies.

  • Configurable OIDC Username Field: Allows setting oidc.claim to specify which OIDC claim to use as the user’s identifier, enhancing flexibility in identity management.

  • Improved NUMA Handling: Enhancements to workloads distribution across NUMA nodes for both container and virtual-machine performance on large systems, including multi-socket systems and AMD systems in NPS4 mode.

  • More Options to Select USB Devices: Introduces busnum, devnum, and serial fields for USB device passthrough, aiding in distinguishing between identical USB devices.

  • Disk I/O Throttling for VMs: Closes a feature gap between containers and virtual machines by enforcing limits.write and limits.read properties on disk devices in VMs.

  • Per-Remote Client Certificates: Allows using specific client certificates for different Incus remotes, enhancing security and flexibility in remote management.

  • Manual Generation of Client Certificate Keypair: Introduces a command to trigger manual generation of the client.crt and client.key keypair.

Improvements #

  • Enhanced lxd-to-incus tool to support migrations from LXD 5.21 LTS and handle Alpine installations.
  • incus-migrate tool now supports using the local Incus system as the migration target and prompts for the firmware type for imported VMs.
  • Introduction of additional image restrictions, including requirements.nesting and requirements.cdrom_agent, to ensure proper instance configurations.

Documentation and Support #

The Incus documentation has been updated to reflect these new features and improvements, providing a comprehensive resource for users. Support is available through the Incus community forum or commercially through Zabbly services. Bugs can be reported via the Incus GitHub repository.

This release of Incus 0.7 represents a significant step forward in container and virtual machine management, offering advanced capabilities for network integration, authentication, and system performance optimizations.

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