Title: LXD to lose access for its image server
Author: Joonas Niilola <[email protected]>
Posted: 2023-12-28
Revision: 1
News-Item-Format: 2.0
Display-If-Installed: app-containers/lxd
Earlier this year Canonical took their LXD project away from the
community-run LinuxContainers and brought it under their own
administration.
While doing so, they removed management access from non-Canonical
employees, along with other things. This caused LXD to be forked and so
Incus was born. Incus would pull updates from upstream LXD to stay
compatible.
Recently LXD was re-licensed so Incus can't benefit from its code
anymore. Therefore Incus will become a truly independent project.
However it is LinuxContainers community that still hosts most LXD
images for free, for Incus and LXD. With them unable to benefit or use
LXD anymore, LinuxContainers have decided to stop building and hosting
LXD images. Realistically they can't support LXD given these
restrictions.
They will start limiting access immediately in 2024 for non-LTS users
which is LXD >=5.18, or "unstable" in Gentoo. LTS LXD, or "stable"
(5.0) in Gentoo will be allowed to pull images until May (an estimate),
or until Incus LTS will be released. Times are subject to change.
What can you do?
================
1: Switch to Incus.
2: Deploy your own image server.
3: Wait and see what Canonical does.
For unstable users the matter is rather critical, while stable users
have the luxury of waiting. Note that a downgrade from unstable to
stable is not possible due to database schemas.
Please follow or take a look at Gentoo bug #920527 with more
information about this situation, and updates e.g. for timetables.
Bug: https://bugs.gentoo.org/920527
