lxc development

[lordhanuman]

A question that is somewhat provocative but also a concern.LXC has slowed down its development pace; now only Ubuntu is involved in developing it, but their efforts are entirely focused on other projects.If they stop developing LXC, what will happen?"

 

[zodiac]

I am sure the Proxmox developers are watching these developments closely. If Ubuntu isn't keeping up with LXC development, then all of the original core development team can be found at https://github.com/lxc/incus And from what I can tell, that project is continuing to be developed. Of course, whenever a fork happens, it's impossible to predict which branch is ultimately going to succeed.

But my guess is that it wouldn't take a huge amount of resources for Proxmox to switch from legacy LXC to Incus, if that was necessary. At least for the time being, the two projects haven't diverged too much, except for Incus stripping out some of the Ubuntu-specific features that Proxmox likely couldn't care less about. I think all of these changes are in the LXD component (now renamed to Incus), and Proxmox doesn't even use that.

In fact, the recent release of Incus https://groups.google.com/a/lists.linuxcontainers.org/g/lxc-devel/c/VwcPqYgPHHU might be attractive to Proxmox, as it has support for directly running OCI application containers. I am not sure how this is implemented and whether it requires support from LXD/Incus or if it can be done with pure LXC. But it certainly would be a welcome addition to Proxmox VE

Edit: Actually, now that I am looking at it a little closer, it turns out that LXC had always been part of linuxcontainers.org, and only LXD was an Ubuntu project. I guess that makes sense. That also means that the Proxmox team isn't really affected by any of this. If I understand correctly, Proxmox VE implements their own version of what LXD and Incus do, but doesn't depend on either of these projects. And all three of them build on top of LXC. My point still stands, Proxmox should take a look at what Incus does for OCI application containers and implement a similar feature.