14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical's Stéphane Graber has announced earlier today, September 16, that version 0.18 of the LXD next-generation container hypervisor for Linux kernel-based operating systems has been tagged, and it is available for download.
Mr. Graber’s announcement has been backed by Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical and Ubuntu, who writes on his Google+ page that LXD is now the new pure-container hypervisor for GNU/Linux systems, allowing users to test their apps at scale while running hundreds of instances of Linux OSes, including Ubuntu, Arch Linux, or CentOS.
"LXD is the new pure-container hypervisor for Linux. It's so efficient that on your laptop you can run hundreds of instances of Ubuntu or CentOS or Arch, perfect for testing your apps at scale," says Mark Shuttleworth. "Adding per-container AppArmor now allows you to confine or shield processes from one another inside the container, just as you can on a normal machine, so it's even closer to 'just another machine.'"
Here's what's new in LXD 0.18
According to the release notes, which we've attached at the end of the article for reference, LXD 0.18 comes with a great number of new features, such as per-container Seccomp and AppArmor profiles, along with a bunch of fixes for some of the most annoying issues reported by users since the previous version of the software.
Prominent features include the addition of a new --force-local argument, support for pushing and pulling files using stdin/stdout, a revamped translation template, socket-activation improvements, support for nested LXD, as well as the implementation of new "shutdown" and "activateifneeded" sub-commands.
Last but not least, LXD 0.18 addresses an issue with the image creation of privileged containers, repairs the detection of shared mounts on Btrfs filesystems, introduces a new script that lets users set up and delete LVM (Logical Volume Management) storage, and adds several other minor under-the-hood improvements.