A little confused here about the relation between Incus, LXC & etc

[John]

• Please note that I’ve had my account here 7 or 8 years now, since 2017 or maybe 2016. I’ve always been respectful and continue to be respectful of the separation of LXC & LXD. I do not ask LXD questions nor post in LXD threads here anymore because of that.

I asked a question tonight about LXC. Never mentioned LXD a single time, not in my thread title nor in my message body. The question was literally solely about LXC.

I’m confused because the topic was closed due to being about LXD, but it was not about LXD, it was about LXC.

Please help me a little with this confusion.

LXC, Incus & LXD are all separate products, correct?

LXC = LinuxContainers.org
Incus = LinuxContainer.org
LXD = Canonical/Ubuntu.com

That is my understanding. That’s correct, right?

So I had an LXC question and asked it here in the LinuxContainers.org forums. That question was closed and hidden, because it was about LXD. But it was not about LXD.

I’m bewildered here.

Where am I supposed to ask questions about LXC if not here?

[stgraber (Stéphane Graber)]

So there are three projects:

• LXC which provides the liblxc C library and has command line tools named (lxc-XYZ)
• LXD which provides a Go daemon named lxd and a command line tool confusingly named lxc
• Incus which provides a Go daemon named incusd and a command line tool named incus

The LXC project, that is, the C library and associated tools at GitHub - lxc/lxc: LXC - Linux Containers is part of Linux Containers, as is Incus. LXD however is not, it was taken away from this project by Canonical over a year ago.

Your forum topic:

How do I get transfer progress / speed output during LXC copy?

Whenever I make copies of containers using the lxc copy command such as: lxc copy container-name container-name-copy I don’t recall ever seeing any info regarding the copy operation. It just completes and that’s it. Today I started using lxc copy to copy from a remote to my local machine via: lxc copy remote:container_name local:container_name And still the same thing. No output from the copy operation. So I’ve tested this with the --verbose option as well as the -v alternative name f…

Shows the use of lxc copy and remotes, that’s LXD with lxc being its command line tool.

[stgraber (Stéphane Graber)]

The whole thing with LXD’s command line tool being named lxc was an attempt by Canonical management to get some free press for LXD and try to get people to transition from traditional LXC to LXD. That went as far as attempting to rename the existing lxc package to lxc2 with LXD then being lxc3.

That never really took off and things have generally reverted back to the old state now with the lxc package being the actual LXC project and LXD being its own thing distributed as a snap.

But LXD keeps on using the lxc name for its command line tool, causing a lot of confusion…

[John]

Stéphane, thanks so much for explaining this.

Crazy, but all this time, for years, I thought I was using LXC from LinuxContainers.org, especially since LXC & LXD were both here on this site when I started using both of them together years ago.

I always thought that “lxc command” and “lxc-command” were simply alternatives names of the same thing, both being LXC.

And I always thought that I was using both products: LXC from here + LXD from there and that they were integrated to function side by side, even after the split. Using lxd commands for some things and lxc commands for everything else also makes it seem like both products are being used.

So my updated understanding now is:

lxc- (lxc-commands) = linuxcontainers
incus = linuxcontainers
lxd = canonica/ubuntu
lxc = canonical/ubuntu
lxc- and lxc are not the same thing, although maybe similar.

You’re absolutely right that Canonical’s use of “lxc” for their command line tool name is confusing.

Thanks again for explaining all this and helping to clear up my confusion.