Repeatable LXD installations

LXD
9

Not quite.

There are two types of LXD releases: feature and LTS.
The feature releases are approximately once a month and are taken from the main branch and given a release number like 4.x (e.g. 4.16, 4.17 etc).
The LXD team also maintaine several LTS series (currently 4.0, 3.0 and 2.0) for 5 years, each series receiving less frequent periodic releases (e.g. 4.0.1, 4.0.2 etc).

You can see these here:

These release are then packaged into a snap and are made available from the snap store via “channels”.
These channels include the release, plus additional cherry-picks for fixes that occur between releases.

The following channels are available:

  • latest/stable - this is the latest feature release (4.x) plus any interim cherry-pick fixes and will automatically update to the next feature release.
  • 4.0/stable - this is the latest 4.0.x LTS release plus any interim cherry-pick fixes and will automatically update to the next LTS point release in the series.
  • 4.x/stable - this is the only available for the last 2 feature releases (4.x), so currently that is 4.16/stable and 4.17/stable. These channels receive cherry-pick fixes until the next feature release is made, at which point they are never updated (no security or bug fixes). However releases older than the last 2 feature release are not available for new installs. So you can’t, for instance, install 4.15/stable now as that no longer exists for new installs, however if you had previously installed using the 4.15/stable channel your system would remain on that release until the channel was manually changed.

The channels available are in the drop down on the top right here Install LXD on Linux | Snap Store

Because the LXD daemon is run as root it is important to keep it up to date, either via the LTS channel or via the feature channel. This is why we are keen not to have people pinned on unsupported releases.