Introduction

This past week’s LXD focus was still on the initial VM feature and its associated storage layer re-work.

It was also a deadline for a number of contributions coming from students at the University of Texas in Austin. Many of those contributions are still under work/review but some got merged this week. This includes laying the ground work required for LXD to use nftables firewall, support for abstracting cgroup v1/v2 and a new way to track external processes (such as dnsmasq and forkprox).

On the VM front two security improvements have been added; firstly the VM processes on the host are now chrooted to their own directory, and secondly they are run as a non-root user. We have also ensured that the 9p share inside the VM that is used by the lxd-agent is mounted in such a way that prevents non-root users in the VM from accessing the share files (as it contains a private TLS key identifying the VM that will be used when communicating with the host).

On the storage front, the directory and cephfs drivers are now finished, the btrfs driver is undergoing review and we are continuing to work on porting the other storage drivers to the new framework.

On the LXC front, works has continued on refactoring the cgroup management functionality as we work towards cgroup2 support.

Contribute to LXD

Ever wanted to contribute to LXD but not sure where to start?

We’ve recently gone through some effort to properly tag issues suitable for new contributors on Github: https://github.com/lxc/lxd/labels/Easy

You can also find a slightly longer, more detailed list here: Contributing to LXD

FOSDEM 2020 - containers devroom

We will once again be running the containers devroom at the upcoming FOSDEM conference in Brussels, Belgium. This year it’s going to be over the weekend of the 1st and 2nd of February.

The detailed call for papers can be found here: FOSDEM 2020 containers devroom: Call for papers

Upcoming events

Ongoing projects

The list below is feature or refactoring work which will span several weeks/months and can’t be tied directly to a single Github issue or pull request.

Virtual machine support

Rework of internal LXD storage handling

Distrobuilder virtual machine support

Various kernel work

Stable release work for LXC, LXCFS and LXD

Upstream changes

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

LXD

LXC

LXCFS

Nothing to report this week

Distrobuilder

Nothing to report this week

Distribution work

This section is used to track the work done in downstream Linux distributions to ship the latest LXC, LXD and LXCFS as well as work to get various software to work properly inside containers.

Ubuntu

Nothing to report this week

Snap