The LXD team is very excited to announce the release of LXD 4.3!
This release comes with a lot of improvements especially for those using virtual machines. It also comes with quite a few bugfixes for our cluster users and general performance improvements.
Block custom storage volumes
Up until now, all custom storage volumes were filesystems. Either a directory/subvolume/dataset on a storage backend which supports that or as a formatted block on the other backends.
Now with virtual machines being supported by LXD, we found ourselves needing to support attaching both our traditional filesystem backed volumes to virtual machines (which has been possible for a while and uses 9p) as well as allowing for additional raw disks to be attached to virtual machines.
This can now be done with block custom storage volumes.
VM: Initial work for graphical console
All LXD VMs now come with virtio-gpu and virtio-input devices out of the box as well as a spice channel currently tied to a local unix socket.
One can directly connect to that socket using a client like spicy but this will soon change and instead have LXD allow remote access to this through websocket using lxc console.
VM: Rework of PCIe layout
We’ve now made sure that every virtio device we expose to the VM is on the PCIe bus, devices have been merged into functions when possible to save the number of slots.
Logic has also been put in place so that network devices should always show up in the same slot and so get a stable name when hardware based naming is enabled.
VM: GPU passthrough
It is now possible to attach gpu type devices to VM, passing a physical GPU through VFIO. Do note that unlike containers that can share GPU with their host, virtual machines cannot.
Direct console attach on lxc start and lxc restart
Both lxc start and lxc restart can now be passed –console when interacting with a single instance. This will cause the command line to immediately attach to the console letting you observe the instance boot sequence.
Isolated CPUs reporting in resources API
A new isolated field is present on all CPU threads now in the /1.0/resources API, this will be set to true if the particular thread is specified as an isolated CPU.
This usually happens when one starts the system with isolcpus= on the kernel command line.
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Mike Halvorsen has been building things with open source software since 1997. As an early adopter of linux container technology, Mike has deep experience using linux containers at scale.