Weekly status #285

tomp · February 13, 2023, 10:25am

Weekly status for the week of 6th February to 12th February.

Introduction

This past week we have landed some of the prerequisite changes for the forthcoming ZFS block mode feature. Additionally LXD can now use the newer and cleaner kernel mount API for passing mounts into containers. And there were some changes to the soon-to-be-released instance placement scriptlet API in order to allow project name to be passed to the scriptlet. Finally, support for newer BTRFS tooling has been added after upstream changes to the tool’s output format.

Additionally @stgraber has also started a new video series on LXD Instance Devices; the first of which is covering the disk device type:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhRw2OYTgtg

Job openings

Canonical Ltd. strengthens its investment into LXD and is looking at building multiple squads under the technical leadership of @stgraber.

As such, we are looking for first line managers (highly technical) and individual contributors to grow the team and pursue our efforts around scalability and clustering.

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

For more info please see LXD related openings at Canonical Ltd (2022-2023)

LXD

Improvements:

Updated the instance placement scriptlet feature to change the request argument to a new data type that includes reason and project fields. Previously it was not possible to ascertain the project for the new instance.
Use newer kernel mount API for moving a mount into a container.
Use volume config when renaming instances and custom volumes. This is required for the forthcoming ZFS block mode feature so the underlying storage driver will be able to generate the underlying volume names correctly.
Improve user facing error when checking if a volume exists on a cluster member target.
Extended optimized instance transfer documentation to provide more detail on how it works.

Bug fixes:

Further fixes to support btrfs-progs >= 6.0 for BTRFS storage pools.
Use volume config from backup index file when restoring instances/volumes from backups. This will allow restores of volumes that require a volume config in order to mount the volume (in order to unpack the backup into it).
Fixed bug in --destination-target flag when copying/moving storage volumes between remotes.
Removed needless semi-colons in queries, which works around a temporary regression in dqlite.

LXC

Bug fixes:

Fixed strlcat return value checks.

YouTube videos

The LXD team is running a YouTube channel with live streams covering LXD releases and weekly videos on different aspects of LXD. You may want to give it a watch and/or subscribe for more content in the coming weeks.

https://www.youtube.com/lxd-videos

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.

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

Fix strlcat’s return value checks

LXCFS

Nothing to report this week

Distrobuilder

Nothing to report this week

LXD Charm

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

Nothing to report this week