[lxc-users] Announcing LXD, LXC and LXCFS 4.0 LTS

[Stéphane Graber]

Hello,

The LXD, LXC and LXCFS teams are very proud to announce their 4.0 LTS releases!

LTS versions of all 3 projects are released every 2 years, starting 6
years ago. Those LTS versions benefit from 5 years of security and
bugfix support from upstream and are ideal for production environments.

# LXD
LXD is our system container and virtual machine manager. It's a Go
application based on LXC and QEMU. It can run several thousand
containers on a single machine, mix in some virtual machines, offers a
simple REST API and can be easily clustered to handle large scale
deployments.

It takes seconds to setup on a laptop or a cloud instance, can run just
about any Linux distribution and supports a variety of resource limits
and device passthrough. It's used as the basis for Linux applications on
Chromebooks and is behind Travis-CI's recent Arm, IBM Power and IBM Z
testing capability.

The main highlights for this release are (compared with 3.0):

 - Support for running virtual machines
 - Introduction of projects (and their limits, restrictions and features)
 - System call interception for containers
 - Backup/restore of instances (as standalone tarball)
 - Automated snapshots (and expiration) for instances and storage volumes
 - Support for "shiftfs" for instances and attached disks
 - New "ipvlan" and "routed" NIC types
 - CephFS as a custom volume storage backend
 - Image replication and multi-architecture support in clusters
 - Role based access control (through Canonical RBAC)
 - Full host hardware reporting through the much extended resources API
 - CGroup2 support
 - Nftables support

4.0.0 release announcement:
https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org/t/lxd-4-0-lts-has-been-released/7231
Try LXD online: https://linuxcontainers.org/lxd/try-it/
Available images: https://images.linuxcontainers.org

# LXC
LXC is our container runtime. It's capable of running both system
containers and application containers (OCI). It's written as a C library
and set of tools with bindings available for a large number of
languages, including go-lxc as used by LXD.

The main highlights for this release are (compared with 3.0):

 - CGroup2 support
 - Infrastructure for system call interception
 - PIDfd support
 - Improved network handling
 - Hardening and refactoring throughout the codebase, fixing very many issues

4.0.0 release announcement:
https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org/t/lxc-4-0-lts-has-been-released/7182

# LXCFS
LXCFS is our FUSE filesystem. It's a daemon written in C which acts as
an overlay usable inside containers to query the available host
resources with cgroup constraints applied. It provides a variety of
overlay files for /proc and /sys as well as a fully virtualized view of
cgroupfs for distributions lacking cgroup namespacing support.

The main highlights for this release are (compared with 3.0):

 - CGroup2 support
 - /proc/cpuinfo and /proc/stat based on cpu shares (--enable-cfs option)
 - /proc/loadavg virtualization (--enable-loadavg option)
 - pidfd supported process tracking (--enable-pidfd option)
 - Hardening of the codebase
 - Improved self re-execution logic with failsafe
 - More comprehensive testsuite (run on all architectures for all changes)

4.0.0 release announcement:
https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org/t/lxcfs-4-0-lts-has-been-released/7031
4.0.1 release announcement:
https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org/t/lxcfs-4-0-1-lts-has-been-released/7130

-- 
Stéphane