Introduction

This past week was incredibly busy and featureful for both LXC and LXD.

We landed Infinband support in LXD, alongside new configuration keys to control the presence of /dev/lxd in the container and support for pre-migration of memory during container live-migration. That’s on top of a variety of bugfixes and other still ongoing feature work.

On the LXC side of things, we’ve added a new reboot2 function to our API, making it possible to block on container restarts, added a new lxc.init.cwd configuration key to control the working directory of the container’s init process, added a new lxc.sysctl set of configuration keys, all while also fixing numerous new issues reported by Coverity Scan and a number of other bugfixes and refactoring.

We’d like to give a shout out to Adrian Reber from Red Hat for the work on memory pre-migration in LXC and LXD as well as to the students of the University of Texas in Austin for contributing the /dev/lxd work in LXD and a number of refactoring of the LXC tools. It’s always great to get new contributors to those projects!

We’re now slowly preparing for LXD 2.21 due next Tuesday, hopefully getting a couple more features in there and fixing any last minute issues.

We also expect LXD 2.0.11 to be pushed to Ubuntu 14.04 later this week as LXD 2.0.11 in Ubuntu 16.04 seems to be doing very well.

Upcoming conferences and events

• FOSDEM 2018 (Brussels, February 2018)

Ongoing projects

The list below is feature or refactoring work which will span several weeks/months and can’t be tied directly to a single Github issue or pull request.

• New “proxy” device type for network forwarding in LXD
• Extend the /dev/lxd interface for LXD containers
• MAAS network integration in LXD
• Distributed database for LXD clustering
• Stable release work for LXC, LXCFS and LXD

Upstream changes

The items listed below are highlights of the work which happened upstream over the past week and which will be included in the next release.

LXD

• Introduced a new security.devlxd configuration key.
• Added a new infiniband device type.
• Update console handling to match current liblxc.
• Added support for CRIU pre-copy migration.
• Fixed path based storage pools in the LXD snap.
• Changed lxd-benchmark to default to running one container.
• Fixed a devlxd locking issue.
• Allowed live update of the new security.devlxd
• Fixed some documentation, allowed for more complex interface names and fixed URL escaping in the client.
• Fixed handling of spaces in disk entry paths.
• Fixed recursive output from certificates API missing the name key.
• Updated the Makefile to better detect sqlite3.
• Tweaked the infiniband support to properly call its devices ibX.

LXC

• Added a new reboot2 API to allow for blocking reboot calls.
• Fixed a number of storage related issues.
• Added a new lxc.init.cwd configuration key.
• Fixed failed attach on non-existing namespace.
• Fixed integration with Coverity scan.
• Fixed argument parsing in lxc-execute.
• Updated the Japanese manpages to cover a number of new config keys.
• Fixed loglevel in container start.
• Gave lxc-init its own argument parser.
• Fixed a number of coverity issues.
• Added a new lxc.sysctl set of config keys.
• Fixed more coverity issues.
• Added better handling of pthread errors.
• Made a number of improvements to the lxc-oci template.
• Fixed some issues with the legacy network config parser.
• Improved clone handling when sharing namespaces.

LXCFS

• Fixed MemAvailable to include cached memory.

Distribution work

This section is used to track the work done in downstream Linux distributions to ship the latest LXC, LXD and LXCFS as well as work to get various software to work properly inside containers.

Ubuntu

• Released LXD 2.0.11 to all Ubuntu 16.04 users.
• Fixed a few issues with lxd init in LXD 2.0.11.

Snap

• Fixed lack of /etc/mtab in the snap environment (as needed for resize on LVM).
• Cherry-picked a number of bugfixes into the stable LXD snap.