Weekly status #206


Weekly status for the week of the 5th of July to the 11th of July.

Introduction

The highlight of the past week was the release of LXD 4.16, please see the release notes for more details.

In preparation for that release, quite a few improvements to the lifecycle API were landed. There was also a round of improvement around race conditions in SR-IOV device handling as well as improving VM startup.

Additionally, there was some preparation work for the upcoming LTS bugfix releases which are due later this week.

Moving our IRC presence to Libera Chat

Our IRC (live chat) channels have moved from Freenode over to Libera Chat.
You can now find us in #lxc and #lxc-dev on irc.libera.chat.
A web chat client can be found here: Kiwi IRC

The LXD team is hiring

The LXD team at Canonical is currently looking for a Go software engineer to join our distributed team of engineers. We’re looking for candidates anywhere in Europe or the Americas!

All LXD positions are 100% remote with some travel for internal events and conferences.

LXD

New features:

  • When using a managed bridge network with DNS enabled, LXD now adds a DNS record for the host/gateway IP under the name _gateway.<domain>, e.g. _gateway.lxd.
  • Supported storage drivers are now returned in lxc info output, and used for lxd init.

Improvements:

  • Improved lifecycle events.
  • Duplicate NIC ipv{n}.address and MAC setting detection.
  • Records last used VSOCK ID when starting VMs (which will allow lxd-agent to work in the forthcoming recovery feature when a running VM is recovered).

Bug fixes:

  • Instance related persistent warnings are now removed when an instance is deleted.
  • Fix SR-IOV NIC race condition when selecting a free virtual function when starting multiple instances concurrently.

Youtube channel

We’ve started a Youtube channel with live streams covering LXD releases and its use in the wider ecosystem.

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

Dqlite (RAFT library)

  • Nothing to report this week

Dqlite (database)

  • Nothing to report this week

Dqlite (Go bindings)

  • Nothing to report this week

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

  • lxd: Cherry-pick upstream bugfixes
  • zfs: Added 2.1 support
  • lxd: Bumped to 4.16
  • libtpms: Bump to 0.8.4
  • ovs: Bump to 2.15.1
  • ovn: Bump to 21.06.0
  • swtpm: Bump to 0.6.0
  • sqlite: Bump to 3.36.0
  • squashfs: Bump to 1.1.2