[lxc-users] basic understanding - clarification sought

[Sean McNamara]

LXD and LXC are basically separate, from a user's point of view. the
`lxc` command is actually LXD. `lxc` followed by a dash, like `lxc-ls`
is LXC. These are sometimes referred to (e.g. in Ubuntu packaging) as
lxc-1.0 (lxc-ls, etc.) and lxc-2.0 (LXD).

LXC containers are not too different from Docker; Docker used to use
liblxc as its base.

LXD containers are designed to feel more like a VM, yes. They _can_ be
slightly larger in size, depending, because they run an entire guest
OS minus the kernel, starting from the init daemon, all libraries,
etc.  But the difference in size isn't terrible if you have a
deduplicating filesystem, FS-level compression, or a small number of
containers (or just a huge amount of disk space). A few gigs per
container base image, at most.

I don't foresee any LXD _code_ ever being locked under a proprietary
license. Canonical doesn't really do that. They do have enterprise
support that you can pay for, but in that case, you are paying them
for services (technical advice and possibly individualized patches or
builds), not for source code or software licenses. The software itself
should remain free and open source, though any company (even a company
other than Canonical) could develop proprietary extensions or
integrations at any time if they wanted to. The license won't prevent
them from doing so. I just think it's unlikely in practice.

Sean


On Fri, Apr 7, 2017 at 10:47 PM, gunnar.wagner
<gunnar.wagner at netcologne.de> wrote:
> hi everybody,
>
> I am a novice to LXC/LXD and am trying to get a basic understanding
> together. I have grasped some things which I am not sure about whether I got
> them wrong or write.
> Maybe this groups is able and willing to confirm or set things straight for
> me
>
> if you run LXD the lxc commands used are different from the lxc commands
> used when running 'bare' lxc (for example 'lxc list'   vs   'lxc-ls
> --fancy')?
>
> LXD runs on the Apache License 2.0 (same as Docker engine) so it could
> happen the same thing to lxd (being divided into Community vc Enterprise
> Edition) any time (legally speaking. Who would be the force to decide on
> such a move? Canonical? Is there any intention to make such a move at any
> point in time?
>
> an LXC container behaves more like a VM then a docker or rkt container does
> (machine- vs app-container), correct? Is it also larger in size?
>
> thanks for clarifying
>
> Gunnar
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> lxc-users mailing list
> lxc-users at lists.linuxcontainers.org
> http://lists.linuxcontainers.org/listinfo/lxc-users