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Incus-OS: Immutable Linux OS to run Incus as a hypervisor

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Re: Incus-OS: Immutable Linux OS to run Incus as a hypervisor

#41

Post by gchamonlive »

qskousen wrote: post #36
gchamonlive wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK LXD is still opensource, as are most if not all products from Canonical. I think the fork is because LXD when it was moved to Canonical made the community uneasy because of the way that they would integrate with Ubuntu lifecycle and tooling. https://github.com/canonical/lxd it's AGPL-V3

My number one reason for moving away from using LXD in production after this change is that LXD is only available through snap, which caused multiple downtimes in the cluster because of the forced updates.

Exactly. And depending on whether you are installing it with snap or other package managers, like pacman in arch, it'll actually use differently folders for configs, so if you are writing automation for say automatically manage remotes without relying on the cli, you'll have to account for that. Better to just use Incus whenever possible.

Re: Incus-OS: Immutable Linux OS to run Incus as a hypervisor

#42

Post by sklarsa »

I've been using Incus containers (not VMs) for running tests against a "real" OS and it's been an absolute game changer for me. It's granted me the ability to simultaneously spin up-and-down a plethora of fresh OSes on my local dev machine, which I then use as testing targets for components of my codebase that require Docker or systemd. With traditional containers, it's tricky to mimic those capabilities as they would exist on a normal VM.

Because both my project and Incus are written in Go, orchestrating Incus resources in my test code has been pretty seamless. And with "ephemeral" containers, if things start to get out of hand, I just need to stop the container to clean it up. Much easier than a 2-step process like it usually is.

Looking forward to seeing what's to come in IncusOS!

Re: Incus-OS: Immutable Linux OS to run Incus as a hypervisor

#43

Post by amluto »

Animats wrote: post #40

Is there such a thing as DIMM modules with ROM chips? It would be useful for some applications to be able to burn the immutable OS into a read only memory as a form of tamper-resistance in key infrastructure.

There are CPUs with fuses that can store keys, e.g. Intel Boot Guard. The tooling to use it as an end user is not friendly to say the least.

You can set your own Secure Boot keys. The history of outrageous security vulnerabilities that break it is long and storied. The underlying architecture is abysmal.

Re: Incus-OS: Immutable Linux OS to run Incus as a hypervisor

#44

Post by acters »

I use incus to pass a containerized kali os the Wayland and x11 sockets, and whatever else maybe in the /run/user/1000 folder and x11 socket folder, like pipewire. It isn't perfect, but it's really nice spawning a shell/bar/etc inside the container and it goes over the current Wayland desktop. Then I am able to use it to spawn other graphical apps. It works really well. Incus is amazing, or lxc and wayland in general.

Re: Incus-OS: Immutable Linux OS to run Incus as a hypervisor

#45

Post by scrps »

azov wrote: post #20
k_bx wrote: post #7

Really excited to try this out. I have a fleet of containers on ubuntu + incus. Not only does this do ZFS optimization, I look forward having easy container optimized backup, live cluster migration (to a different machine without downtime) and so much more. I use Proxmox on fat servers, but for homelab-like setup Incus OS seems more like a sweet spot

I was hoping for easy backup via zfs send as well, but turns out it’s not so easy atm. IncusOS does not give you shell access, you have to figure out IncusOS ways to do things via their CLI/API. I haven’t found an easy way to do incremental backup of the whole system yet. You can backup individual instances/volumes via incus export (which seems to use zfs send under the hood), but not the whole thing. I have mixed fe…

Check out SmartOS, it's illumos/solaris based but I think you'll find it is a nice middle ground. Not as abstracted, nice tooling that makes common tasks simple but not so opinionated you have to de-abstract things to get under the hood. Not painless but what is?

Re: Incus-OS: Immutable Linux OS to run Incus as a hypervisor

#46

Post by loloquwowndueo »

octagons wrote: post #27

I’ve been running an Incus cluster of 3 fairly beefy servers for about a year now. It’s my go-to recommendation for anyone wanting to setup a new virtualized environment. One of my favorite features is how you can tag different cluster members for different architectures. In the same cluster, I can have traditional dual-socket x86 servers with a dozen DIMM slots as well as Raspberry Pis. The architecture tagging lets…

* Stéphane Graber.

Re: Incus-OS: Immutable Linux OS to run Incus as a hypervisor

#47

Post by emilfihlman »

Incus is very nice and super featured, but suffers from a few issues, namely unintuitive/hard onboarding and bad defaults, which makes giving access to people annoying, as it requires teaching them first and that they can't just make a vm with a few clicks immediately, limited authentication and user control options, like if no external auth users must exist on underlying system, and with limited but very strict auth options requires a full domain and no proxying, currently (might get fixed partially later).

And finally, it suffers from hardcore tracking upstream, ie canonical/lxd(-ui), meaning they won't really do any changes that lxd wouldn't do, and thus are slaved to them : (

Re: Incus-OS: Immutable Linux OS to run Incus as a hypervisor

#48

Post by stormking »

johntash wrote: post #22
genshii wrote: post #10

I used Proxmox for years to run a fairly comprehensive homelab, and a few months ago replaced the entire thing with Incus (on a debian host, haven't tried IncusOS yet). Incus is amazing and it makes so many things so much easier compared to Proxmox. One thing in particular is permissions in unprivileged containers. In Proxmox, you have to do a bunch of somewhat confusing ID mapping. In Incus, it's as simple as settin…

Can Incus do regular vms too, or only LXCs? I think I looked at it before but wrote it off because I still have some workloads that have to be in VMs.

It can do VMs, "system containers" like LXC and Docker/OCI-compatible application containers.

There was a project to implement a dockcer-compose compatible "incus-compose" but unfortunately, it looks dead, right now.

You can even set up a kubernetes cluster entirely composed of containers: https://github.com/lxc/cluster-api-provider-incus

Re: Incus-OS: Immutable Linux OS to run Incus as a hypervisor

#49

Post by stormking »

victorbjorklund wrote: post #19
genshii wrote: post #10

I used Proxmox for years to run a fairly comprehensive homelab, and a few months ago replaced the entire thing with Incus (on a debian host, haven't tried IncusOS yet). Incus is amazing and it makes so many things so much easier compared to Proxmox. One thing in particular is permissions in unprivileged containers. In Proxmox, you have to do a bunch of somewhat confusing ID mapping. In Incus, it's as simple as settin…

Interesting. Is there anything else that is better than proxmox? Like performance etc?

Besides VMs and LXC/Proxmox-style containers, it can also run docker containers out of the box.

Re: Incus-OS: Immutable Linux OS to run Incus as a hypervisor

#50

Post by stormking »

udev4096 wrote: post #9
leoedin wrote: post #8

I guess IncusOS (and Incus) achieve similar goals to ProxMox? Has anyone used both and have any opinions on how they perform?

I have switched to incus and it's really great. It's lightweight, has a working terraform provider, easy-to-use cli, pre-built images (LXC and VM) of major distros (while in proxmox, you have to create templates all the time for VMs), runs on any distro (on proxmox, you're stuck with debian), clustering is nice, supports bunch of storage drivers (dir, btrfs, ceph, zfs), simple web UI and active community. The project…

I love the ability to directly run docker containers.

I think their approach to authentication / authorization is insane (not in a good way).

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