Weekly status #303

[tomp (Thomas Parrott)]

Weekly status for the week of 12th June to 18th June.

Introduction

The highlight of the past week is the addition of the instance rebuild feature in LXD. This allows conveniently rebuilding an instance from an image (or empty) without having to reconfigure it. See below for more details.

Additionally @stgraber has added a video covering managing LXD with Terraform:

Terraform and LXD

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 instance rebuild feature. See Linux Containers - LXD - Has been moved to Canonical

Improvements:

• Only load vhost_vsock kernel module if /dev/kvm support is detected. This way if VM support is not available LXD does not also load the vsock module needed for the VM lxd-agent process.
• Switched to (os.File).ReadDir in VM VDPA setup as more efficient.

Bug fixes:

• Fixed file descriptor leak of liblxc log files.
• Only delete ZFS volume on migration failure if not doing a refresh.
• Fixed panic when starting GPU device that doesn’t have DRM support.
• Fixed incorrect secure boot question handling in lxd-migrate.
• Fixed GPU mdev concurrent setup handling.
• Increased BGP restart timeout to 1 hour to allow for larger clusters to refresh without losing advertisements.

Distrobuilder

New features:

• Added VyOS support.
• Added Rocky Vault support.

Improvements:

• Explicitly set filesystem type when mounting for security reasons.
• Detect Windows architecture from filename.

Bug fixes:

• Fixed cache directory removal if its a mount point.

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

• lxddoc: a go-swagger like documentation tool
• Support for instance rebuild
• lxd/storage: Honor target storage config when migrating
• operations: Use map[string][]url.URL as resources passed to Operations
• Use Print/Println when no format specifier is provided/needed
• Instances: Fix file descriptor leaks of liblxc
• Storage: Only delete ZFS volume on failure if not doing refresh in createVolumeFromMigrationOptimized
• Device: Fix panic when GPU device doesn’t have DRM support in startContainer
• Test: Small tweaks to aid in running tests on Github runners
• lxd/device: Fix regression for not properly checking for GPU DRM information
• lxd-migrate: Fix SecureBoot handling
• Revert “lxd/device: Fix regression for not properly checking for GPU DRM information”
• github: Simplify static-analysis tests
• Fix loading vhost_vsock module when VMs are not supported
• github: re-add gettext package for static-analysis
• test: Add support for running test suite on Github runners
• doc: move .sphinx directory and conf.py file
• test: skip cleanup if executing from a GitHub Action runner
• Improve mdev GPU handling
• lxd/bgp: Allow one hour for LXD restart
• lxd/ip: improve performance of getVhostVDPADevInPath

LXC

• Nothing to report this week

LXCFS

• Nothing to report this week

Distrobuilder

• main: Fix cache directory removal if it’s a mountpoint
• windows: Detect Windows architecture from filename
• sources/rocky: Support Rocky Vault
• sources: Add VyOS
• *: Set fstype when mounting

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

[trevor (Trevor Sullivan)]

FYI the docs should indicate which version of LXD is required in order to use the rebuild feature. Otherwise, I’d expect someone to try to run the command on a current LXD version, and become frustrated because the command is missing.

https://linuxcontainers.org/lxd/docs/latest/howto/instances_manage/

[ru-fu]

@trevor The latest docs follow what is on the master branch at a given time. You can switch the doc version to 5.0.x to see the docs that correspond to the latest stable release.

What we don’t have is a version for the latest feature release, but with feature releases coming out as frequently as they do, this shouldn’t cause too many problems. Adding notes for new features and removing them again for each feature release would cause a lot of overhead (and would probably lead to more confusion eventually, since it wouldn’t be done consistently).

[tomp (Thomas Parrott)]

Maybe also worth noting that each LXD 5.x release is only supported for a month until the next release, so its not recommended to be running an older release of the latest/stable channel.