The new hypervisor LXD • Hacker News Board

The concept is relatively simple, it's a daemon exporting an authenticated REST API both locally over a unix socket and over the network using https. There are then two clients for this daemon, one is an openstack plugin, the other a standalone command line tool. ''

The main features and I'm sure I'll be forgetting some are:

- Secure by default (unprivileged containers, apparmor, seccomp, ...)

- Image based workflow (no more locally built rootfs)

- Support for online snapshotting, including running state (with CRIU)

- Support for live migration

- A simpler command line experience

This work will be done in Go, using the great go-lxc binding from S.Çağlar.

Now as to what this means for LXC upstream:

- A new project will be setup at https://github.com/lxc/lxd .

- Code to this project will be contributed under an Apache2 license, no CLA is required but we will require contributors to Sign-off on their commits as always (DCO).

- Discussions about lxd will happen on lxc-devel and lxc-users.

- Contributions to github.com/lxc/lxd will happen through github pull requests only and reviews will happen on github too.

This is kept separate from the main tree because at least initially, I believe it best to have a separate release schedule for both of those and because it tends to be easier for Go-only projects to live in theirown branch.

...

In order to be a good hypervisor, we also need to make containers feel like they are their own system and so we'll be spending quite a bit of time figuring out how to improve the situation. Some of the work presented at Linux Plumbers is going to contribute to that, like cgmanagerfs to provide a reasonable view of /proc and a fake cgroupfs, Seth's unprivileged FUSE mounts and all the cool things mentioned in Serge's earlier post about

Now as for the next steps. We will be creating the repository on github over the next few hours with Serge and I as the initial maintainers. Once the project is properly started and active, we will promote some of the most active contributors to commiters.

The first few commits in there will be text versions of the specifications we came up with until now. This should also serve as a good todo list for people who want to get involved.

Over the next few days/weeks, the existing code which was used for the demo at the OpenStack summit in Paris will be submitted through pull requests, reviewed and merge.

...

"

see more: https://lists.linuxcontainers.org/pipermail/lxc-devel/2014-N...

and check the thread here :

[lxc-users]: https://lists.linuxcontainers.org/pipermail/lxc-users/2014-N...

[lxc-devel]: https://lists.linuxcontainers.org/pipermail/lxc-devel/2014-N...

Re: The new hypervisor LXD

#25

Post by tanglesome » Tue, Nov 04, 2014, 10:37 PM UTC

xorcist wrote: post #7

What? My first thought was "cool, Ubuntu backs LXC". My second was "waitaminute, Ubuntu actually wants to compete with Docker?". Docker, as you all know, is a farily well established LXC management solution. They then go on to state that LXC is a "real hypervisor" with live migrations and such. What? Did they take an established Linux household name, with wikipedia article and everything, and name their new semi-rela…

Lxd will Not be competiting with Docker. It's meant to complement it. As for the rest of your questions, I'm digging around to see what else I can find.

Re: The new hypervisor LXD

#26

Post by nl » Tue, Nov 04, 2014, 10:41 PM UTC

sp332 wrote: post #15

xorcist wrote: post #7

What? My first thought was "cool, Ubuntu backs LXC". My second was "waitaminute, Ubuntu actually wants to compete with Docker?". Docker, as you all know, is a farily well established LXC management solution. They then go on to state that LXC is a "real hypervisor" with live migrations and such. What? Did they take an established Linux household name, with wikipedia article and everything, and name their new semi-rela…

Docker, well-established? It may get a lot of press but it's not even two years old. It was just merged into OpenStack about 1 year ago. Edit: You know Docker doesn't use LXC by default anymore, right? It uses a different container library called libcontainer.

And yet oddly for something so young, it's seeing more usage than OpenStack. Of course that may have more to do with the problems within OpenStack, but Docker has it's own attractions too.

Re: The new hypervisor LXD

#27

Post by bcantrill » Tue, Nov 04, 2014, 10:45 PM UTC

pella wrote: post #24

more info from Stéphane Graber Ubuntu developer: ---------- '" ... The concept is relatively simple, it's a daemon exporting an authenticated REST API both locally over a unix socket and over the network using https. There are then two clients for this daemon, one is an openstack plugin, the other a standalone command line tool. '' The main features and I'm sure I'll be forgetting some are: - Secure by default (unpri…

Thank you; that's very helpful. And the tl;dr is that this whole announcement is describing something that doesn't really exist yet -- it's open source vaporware.

Re: The new hypervisor LXD

#28

Post by pella » Tue, Nov 04, 2014, 10:47 PM UTC

short video ( 2:07)

"LXD - the Linux Container Daemon" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-lXf85Mhno

''"Published on 4 Nov 2014 Dustin Kirkland, Product Manager at Canonical introduces LXD (lex-dee), a new hypervisor that delivers capabilities to LXC containers that cloud users demand in scale out infrastructure. LXD is a persistent system daemon developed to enable the secure management and live migration of LXC (lex-cee) containers via an easy to use command line interface and REST API."''

Re: The new hypervisor LXD

#29

Post by matthewmacleod » Tue, Nov 04, 2014, 10:52 PM UTC

druiid wrote: post #3

Is it me or is Ubuntu kind of like the Sony of server software? It always seems like they are developing concurrent solutions to fit into their model of doing things. Where Sony pushes their own special formats like Memory Stick, Ubuntu pushes Upstart, Juju and now LXD. I think in the end this isn't entirely helpful to the ecosystem as a whole when you have Ubuntu attempting to push their special formats of things wh…

Upstart is a bad example, for reasons that other have pointed out. It appears that LXD is being developed along with LXC, so I can't really see it as a "concurrent solution"; Juju is much the same, in that I don't think it's concurrent with any other project that does that same thing.

So I don't think the comparison with Sony holds any water.

Re: The new hypervisor LXD

#30

Post by sauere » Tue, Nov 04, 2014, 10:53 PM UTC

> hardware-guaranteed security to ensure that those machines can’t pry or spy on one another

Please stop using container/virtualization as a security mechanism. It never worked, i never will work.