Weekly status #175


Weekly status for the week of the 16th of November to the 22nd of November.

Introduction

This past week has continued our focus on fixing storage related bugs, however LXD also gained support for GPU passthrough for virtual machines.

LXD

LXD gained support for GPU passthrough for VMs (both physical and mediated device modes via a new device sub-type which can be specified using the gputype config key). Please see https://linuxcontainers.org/lxd/docs/master/instances#type-gpu for more info.

Related to mediated GPU devices, additional information about available devices has been added to the lxc info command.

Virtual machine instances now always display their disk usage when running lxc info <instance> even if they are stopped.

On the networking side, continuing on from last week’s addition of the volatile.uuid instance key, which stores a persistent unique UUID for each instance that will remain the same even after an lxd import, we are now using this UUID to generate the OVN logical switch port names rather than using the instance’s DB ID. This way even an instance with an OVN NIC is imported using lxd import while running (causing the DB ID to change) when the instance is stopped the OVN logical switch port will still be cleanly removed from the OVN Northbound database.

We have also fixed an issue that was reported when using SR-IOV NIC devices with the Broadcom bnx2x driver. This was because the driver apparently does not allow resetting the virtual function’s assigned MAC address to zero (which some SR-IOV drivers do require before the VF can have MAC filtering disabled).

On the storage side we continue our focus on fixing storage bugs, this past week the following issues have been fixed:

  • Fixed a regression in the volume migration that was not maintaining quotas in the target.
  • Fixed an issue that prevented migration of an instance that had a snapshot with a disk device that could not be validated on the target because the source directory was missing on the target.
  • Custom block volumes on Ceph or LVM storage pools were being erroneously created with filesystem related default settings (specifically block.filesystem and block.mount_options). These were unused, but were causing validation to fail when editing the custom block volume (e.g. to resize it) because validation was correctly detecting these keys were inappropriate for the volume’s content type. The fix for existing volumes is to remove the offending keys, and new volumes will no longer have them added.
  • Profile changes are now applied to affected VMs (if possible) and for disk resizes where online resize is not supported, we have added support for next-boot deferred resize (like containers have).

LXC

An issue that prevented using lxc-wait on a yet to be running container has now been fixed.

Also an issue preventing container start on Linux 5.10.0-rc3 due to being unable to read /proc/self/mountinfo using sendfile has been fixed.

Distrobuilder

An issue preventing lxd-agent start in OpenRC based distros has been fixed.

Youtube channel

We’ve started a Youtube channel with a couple of live streams so far.
You may want to give it a watch and/or subscribe for more content in the coming weeks.

Contribute to LXD

Ever wanted to contribute to LXD but not sure where to start?
We’ve recently gone through some effort to properly tag issues suitable for new contributors on Github: Easy issues for new contributors

Upcoming events

  • Nothing to report this week

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.

  • Distrobuilder Windows support
  • Virtual networks in LXD
  • Various kernel work
  • 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

LXC

LXCFS

  • Nothing to report this week

Distrobuilder

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

  • Nothing to report this week

Snap

  • Nothing to report this week