Weekly news #355

LXD News
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Weekly status for the week of 15th July to 21st July.

Introduction

The highlights of the past week were the LXD 5.21.2 LTS and 5.0.3 LTS interim snap releases.

Allow instance import from QCoW2 and VMDK format

Previously, LXD supported importing virtual machines in raw disk format only. Now, it also supports importing virtual machines from various disk formats, such as QCow2 and VMDK, with image conversion handled directly on the LXD server.

Virtual machine images can be imported using the lxd-migrate tool, which is available either from LXD release assets (at the time of writing, only release 6.1 includes the conversion support) or by installing it using go:

go install github.com/canonical/lxd/lxd-migrate@latest

Image formatting during conversion is enabled by default, which is equivalent to using the --conversion=format flag. To import a virtual machine, run lxd-migrate and follow the questions that will lead you towards successful import of the new instance.

lxd-migrate --conversion=format

Documentation: How to import physical or virtual machines to LXD instances

External QEMU snap support

The LXD snap bundles a version of QEMU, which is used by LXD when running virtual machines.

However, in some specific cases, a custom QEMU is required in order to include custom patches or functionality that is not provided by the default build.

To facilitate this, the LXD snap now supports connecting a custom external QEMU snap. An example of a snapcraft file with the instructions on how to build and connect it with LXD can be found in the lxd-pkg-snap repository: External QEMU snap for LXD snap

Bugfixes

  • Fixed an issue where despite security.devlxd.images being enabled, the LXD running within a container would not be able to retrieve accessible cached image from the host LXD.
    The permission checker now properly handles internal access over the devlxd unix socket.

  • Fixed a LXD crash when a device of type none was added to a running instance.
    When the device did not return the run config, the field in nil configuration was referenced.

  • Fixed an issue where an incorrect image creation time would be shown when listing images because only the date was parsed from the timestamp resulting in time always being shown as 12:00am (UTC).

  • Fixed inconsistent order of supported LXD drivers in API response (GET /1.0).

  • Fixed an issue where a container apparmor profile rejected nosymfollow mount option.

All changes

The items listed below is all of the work which happened over the past week and which will be included in the next release.

LXD

LXD UI

The options migration.stateful and security.nesting are now available in LXD UI for configuring instances and profiles during both creation and edit.

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 LXD as well as work to get various software to work properly inside containers.

Ubuntu

  • Nothing to report this week.

LXD snap

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