Behold, Incus: Check out this fork of Canonical’s LXD ‘containervisor’

SUSE developer Aleksa Sarai has created Incus, a fork of Canonical’s LXD code, with the backing of the now-former lead developer of the container-manager-cum-hypervisor.

A month ago, Canonical announced LXD would not be independent any more, and the Ubuntu maker was withdrawing it from the Linux Containers project and taking development in-house.

Soon afterward at least one potential reason for Canonical’s move became public: the former lead engineer of LXD, Stéphane Graber, declared that he had left the Linux distro developer. He stated he planned to continue contributing to the project and will be working under the handle Zabbly:

Well, presumably, it did become a barrier, because now two new forks of LXD have appeared. One is Graber’s own fork of Incus, and he was quick to point out was made to help with the development of Sarai’s project.

So now we have Incus, forked from the upstream LXD codebase by Sarai, known online as Cyphar. There’s already a list of a dozen issues with the new fork – notably, all created by Graber. These revolve around removing dependencies and hooks into other Canonical tools and technologies.

The ensuing discussion on Hacker News contains some interesting information. Graber himself said:

While he was still at Canonical, Graber described how to use LXD on ChromeOS, and others have gone into considerably more detail about how it works, as well as how to run other distros than the default Debian.

Canonical staff have previously stated that “the LXD snap produced by the LXD team is the preferred way to consume LXD.”

Graber, however, continued, saying:

Although these have reportedly been fixed in more recent releases of LXD, as recently as last year, users reported problems around running Snap inside LXD containers, describing the workarounds as being “as hacky as anything.”

Given the controversy surrounding Snap packaging, it is understandable that some people interested in trying LXD are not keen on using the Snap version.

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Ubuntu founder and “self-appointed benevolent dictator for life”, or SABDFL, Mark Shuttleworth has also commented in this discussion, stressing that:

Graber pointed out that natively-packaged versions of LXD are included in other distributions – as, to be fair, does LXD’s documentation.

However, if that tick-list of removing integration with other Ubuntu functionality is any indication, this increased distance from Ubuntu could in time prove to be a significant differentiator for Incus – as well as boost its popularity. ®

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