Weekly status #286


Weekly status for the week of 13th February to 19th February.

Introduction

The highlight of the past week was the release of LXD 5.11. This was a pretty packed release with a couple of big highlight features, specifically the instance placement scriptlet and ZFS zvol support but also included are quite a few other smaller features, performance improvements and bugfixes.

Please see the release notes and release video for more details:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMLiK1fX4I0

Additionally @stgraber has continued his series on LXD Instance Devices, this week covering the unix-char, unix-block and unix-hotplug device types .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2e3LD5wLI8

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

New features:

  • Added support for ZFS block mode. This is controlled by the volume.zfs.block_mode, volume.block.filesystem and volume.block.mount_options ZFS storage pool settings. See [LXD] ZFS block mode for more information.

Improvements:

  • Refreshed and improved the Images section of the documentation.
  • Added a documentation section about troubleshooting failing instances.
  • Improved the forkproxy AppArmor profile to prevent unnecessary DENIED entries in the system logs.
  • Added support for converting Go structs to Starlark objects for the instance placement scriptlet.
  • Added support for the network option to the physical NIC type. This allows using physical type networks (although only one instance can be running at a time per network because the physical device is passed into the instance).
  • Removed trust password configuration from lxd init. For both clusters and standalone, we now support and recommend using one time tokens rather than relying on the trust password. Users who absolutely need this will now need to manually set core.trust_password.

Bug fixes:

  • Fixed an issue where BTRFS optimized refresh would perform a full copy instead of just an optimized diff between the previously transferred snapshots.
  • Fixed the CRIU (container live migration) integration in LXD. This was previously preventing live migration of even a basic Busybox container, which now works.
  • Fixed an issue where if you had a stale cached image in one project and the same cached image in another project (which wasn’t stale) then when LXD went to remove the stale cached image entry it was also removing the on-disk image files, which was preventing instances being created from the remaining image entry in the other project. LXD will now only delete the on-disk image files when the image is considered stale in all projects its used in.
  • Fixed Ceph filesystem custom volume support for VMs. This had been regressed and was trying to pass the filesystem volume as an RBD block device into the VM. Now it has been reverted to being passed via 9p/virtiofsd like other filesystem volumes.
  • Fixed VM Ceph support for parsing the Ceph keyring configuration setting, rather than using the default location only.
  • For cgroup v2 containers LXD was not properly handling soft memory limits. Previously it was setting memory.low parameter for soft limits, but memory.high should be used instead.
  • Fixed bug that prevented management of network DNS zone records in non-default projects.
  • Improve network forward and network load balancer conflict validation between networks. LXD now checks for conflicting network forwards on the OVN uplink network when using a bridge network as the uplink.

LXC

Bug fixes:

  • Fix nftables syntax for IPv6 NAT in lxc-net.
  • Use PRIu64 for uint64_t in setproctitle.

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

LXCFS

  • Nothing to report this week

Distrobuilder

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

  • minio: Bump to 2023-02-10
  • nvidia-container: Bump to v1.12.0
  • ovs: Bump to v3.1.0
  • ovn: Bump to v22.12.0
  • zfs: Bump to 2.19
  • lxd: Bump to 5.11
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