Weekly news #362

LXD News
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Weekly status for the week of 2nd September to 8th September.

Introduction

Summarizing a week full of complex bugfixes and exciting new features. From fixing races during a cluster recovery process to reworking firmware detection for VMs. The introduction of many shell completion features, support for creating many different resources from YAML strings and newly introduced API metrics as a part of a Disaster Recovery Framework for MicroCloud were some of the main changes introduced this past week. Once again featuring some contributions cherry picked from Incus. Thanks to all the contributors!

API request metrics for disaster recovery

Added API failure detection metrics as part of a disaster recovery framework in MicroCloud. This feature introduces metrics containing the number of completed and ongoing requests on a LXD server.

These can be use for detecting failures on each LXD server in a cluster. The new metrics are accessible through the /1.0/metrics endpoint on each LXD server along with the existing metrics and can be consumed by Canonical Observability Stack (COS) or other third-party solutions.

The full public spec can be found here

Documentation: API rates metrics

Cluster recovery improvements

The cluster recovery process has been reworked to fix an issue with how LXD uses Dqlite during a cluster recover in order to avoid potential inconsistencies between the different LXD databases. Please see Cluster Recovery Process misuses dqlite Ā· Issue #13524 Ā· canonical/lxd Ā· GitHub for more details on the issue.

Documentation How to recover a cluster

Improved CLI completions (from Incus)

Added improved shell completion for lxc commands for bash, zsh, fish and powershell. This includes shell completions for:

  • Remotes
  • Projects
  • Storage pools and volumes
  • Image names
  • Networks, ACLs, zones, peers and forwards
  • Load balancers
  • Profiles
  • Instance names
  • Clusters, cluster groups and roles
  • Instance configuration keys
  • Instance configuration templates
  • Devices

Completion profiles can be generated through lxc completion [shell].

Documentation: Shell completions

Support creation of various resources from YAML (from Incus)

Added support to create the following entities from YAML strings:

  • Cluster Groups
  • Storage Pools
  • Storage Volumes
  • Instance snapshots
  • Storage volume snapshots

As an example, here is how one can create a storage pool from a YAML string:

$ lxc storage create storage-pool-name dir << EOF
description: foo
config:
  source: /path/to/source/dir
EOF

Firmware detection rework for VMs (from Incus)

There are several fixes and improvements related to VM firmware detection. The main highlights under this topic were:

  • Support for Ubuntu 24.04 OVMF
  • Support OVMF filenames on arm64 (from Incus)
  • Recognize ArchLinux x86_64 OVMF paths (from Incus)
  • Support both LXD_QEMU_FW_PATH and LXD_OVMF_PATH environmental variables

Bugfixes and minor improvements

  • Fixed bypassing limits.instances thresholds on a project in a LXD cluster (from Incus).

  • Allow managed volumes if the projectā€™s restricted.devices.disk is set to allow (from Incus).

  • Made the LXD agent compatible with SELinux by reworking the access to /run/* in those systems (from Incus).

  • Fixed incompatibility of the lxd-agent install script with SUSE due to systemd and udev path differences.

  • Fixed having wrong values for projects instance limits accounting when using the PowerFlex storage driver.

LXD UI

  • Instance export now lets users download backup files from the UI.

  • Support for GPUs and all other device types has been added to the configuration forms of instances and profiles.

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

LXD Charm

  • Nothing to report this week

Ubuntu

  • Nothing to report this week.

LXD snap

4 Likes
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Hey pedro-rib :smiley:

Are you interested in expanding the coverage of your teamā€™s activities ? UWN now has inaugurated a new section ā€œUbuntu Meeting Activity Reportsā€. As proper coverage is beyond our scope to determine what the LXD Team would like a focus on (instead of a generic, somewhat quick outsiders view), would you commit to making up a weekly - 4 sentence - summary in the sub-section of our Community NewsLetter?
If You, or a member of the LXDā€™s Team, will undertake this responsibility/obligation this will provide much greater exposure than the single line presently listed in the Meeting Reports section of the letter.

Regards

3 Likes
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Sure! We can arrange for whoever is responsible for the weekly news each week to do a summary for ā€œUbuntu Meeting Activity Reportsā€ as well. And that would be me this week, so I will gladly do it if I am not too late for that :smiley:

1 Like
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pedro-rib - \o/

Great to have the LXD participation.

The letter is a open WIKI wherein one can edit the letter directly. Our Window for release closes at about 01:00 UTC Mondays. See, there is plenty of time to get a summary together.
When opened for editing (raw) one can then see the editorial comments.

Cheers

1 Like
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Where can we get the URL for this?

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hey ya tomp -

One quick way to access the NewsLetter:
Discourse hamburger menue > Ubuntu Weekly News category > weekā€™s current edition. (Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 857)
Edit button at the bottom of the post, In the event that you will be editing for a bit - we do request advisement that you are editing, As there can be but one editing session in progress at any given time, please advise of this action on our IRC instance.

I do hope that you find the experience rewarding and not a burden,

Regards

1 Like