Incus, a community fork of LXD, now part of Linux Containers | Hacker News Reader

Incus, a community fork of LXD, now part of Linux Containers

discuss.linuxcontainers.org

102 pointsropyeett8 comments

Pleased about this. I'm a huge fan of LXD. It's a powerful and underrated piece of tech.

I don't think the story on container (and VM!) orchestration is settled, and I'll be interested to see how the devs evolve the tech. I'll be deploying it, for sure.

Can anyone offer the story behind this fork? with as little hyperbole as possible, what does "Canonical’s decision to take LXD away from Linux Containers" mean?

(Given that "we have made the decision to take Incus under the umbrella of Linux Containers and will commit to it the infrastructure which was previously made available to LXD", so is it right that the team had considered re-assigning those resources somewhere else, or was there a time elapsed or something going on where they didn't want to immediately just fork the code)

Obviously, there's always emotions involved in any split like this, but I'm just looking to know why it actually happened (facts) and the practical impact it will have on LXD, especially for other non-Canonical distros. Is this really a SUSE-only fork, or is it for other distros as well?

Update: found this, which seems to help explain some of the backstory: https://linuxcontainers.org/lxd/

> Obviously, there's always emotions involved in any split like this, but I'm just looking to know why it actually happened (facts) and the practical impact it will have on LXD, especially for other non-Canonical distros. Is this really a SUSE-only fork, or is it for other distros as well?

The maintainer works at SUSE but this is not a SUSE project.

The link in the parent post is probably the best source, particularly the line:

> While the team behind Linux Containers regrets that decision and will be missing LXD as one of its projects, it does respect Canonical’s decision

That team includes Stéphane Graber who was for years the project lead for LXD, and a highly-visible evangelist for the project, producing videos[1] every couple weeks and answering questions on the forum[2].

He quit Canonical a few days after this announcement[3].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/@LXD/videos [2]: https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org [3]: https://stgraber.org/2023/07/10/time-to-move-on/

It's hard to know how these things will play out, of course, but this 10-hour-old post has additional info about what the Incus team is planning.

https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org/t/introducing-incus/1778...

> In addition to Aleksa, the initial set of maintainers for Incus will include Christian Brauner, Serge Hallyn, Stéphane Graber and Tycho Andersen, effectively including the entire team that once created LXD.

How does LXD compare with LXC?

LXC is essentially a library file that implements Linux containers via a combination of network namespaces, chroot jails, process isolation, etc.

LXD is daemon that manages LXC containers, networks, groups, has a database, etc.

LXD is a management layer for LXC containers, which lets you do things like move/copy containers (to another host), start/stop them, create/attach/detach profiles (network settings), attach/manage various kinds of storage, etc.

LXD also can manage libvirt/KVM/QEMU virtual machines in an almost identical way, so you can mix LXC containers and full VMs and manage them in the same way.

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