Non-Linux VMs on images.linuxcontainers.org?

Incus
1

So this is probably a bit of a naïve question but is there any way we could get non-Linux images in the images repo? Imagine you could run

  • incus launch images:freebsd/14.2 --vm nearly-unix-vm
  • incus launch images:haiku/beta-5 --vm poem-vm
  • incus launch images:redox/0.9.0 --vm rusty-vm
  • incus launch images:openIndiana/2024.04 --vm illumos-vm
  • incus launch images:reactOs/0.4.14 --vm i-cannt-believe-its-not-windows-vm
  • incus launch images:freeDos/1.3 --vm really-not-windows-vm

And get a variety of free/libre operating systems in a VM in a single command!
Obviously this wouldn’t work for windows/macos for licensing reasons.

This would make incus an even more next-gen virtualization solution!

2

The criteria for an image to be made available on our image server is that it needs to be fully functional. Currently incus-agent has only ever been made to work on Linux, so it would need to be made to build on BSD, DOS, Solaris, … and be included in any such image before we start adding them to the public image server.

Note that this obviously doesn’t prevent anyone from running their own public image server with images that don’t meet our criteria :slight_smile:

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3

Thank you for your response! That makes a lot of sense.

For anyone wondering what the state of this currently is:

4

For Windows maybe viosock could be available next year. [QUESTION] Plan to add Viosock driver to release · Issue #1185 · virtio-win/kvm-guest-drivers-windows · GitHub

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