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Incus

INFRA · APIS
Velocity6.3

Manager for virtual machines and system containers

linuxcontainers.org/incus ↗

Incus 7.4 turns a year of migration plumbing into near-live migration that actually moves disks.

container managernear-live migrationsecure bootnvramcephcluster operations
◆Current state
7.0.0 LTS became the supported baseline in May with 7.0.1 as its first patch, while the feature branch kept a roughly monthly cadence: 7.1 cleaned up issues the LTS surfaced, 7.2 added migration-compatible hypervisor flags for stateful migration, 7.3 shipped native Windows and macOS installers. 7.4 is the largest of them and the first with a headline capability — near-live migration implemented on both client and server, extended to dependent disks inside a cluster, with incremental memory migration made opt-in. Alongside it sit Secure Boot key management, a substantial NVRAM rework, librbd for all Ceph interactions, and disk and NIC burst limits.
◆Where it's heading
Migration has been the through-line for three releases and 7.4 is where it becomes a feature rather than plumbing. The pattern is consistent: 7.2 made stateful migration survive non-identical hosts, 7.4 makes moving an instance cheap enough to do routinely, including the storage that hangs off it. Around that, the VM side is maturing toward parity with commercial hypervisors — firmware key management, NVRAM control, per-device rate limits — which is the surface that decides whether Incus is usable as a datacentre hypervisor rather than a container manager that also runs VMs.
◆Prediction
Expect the next release to harden near-live migration rather than replace it — the evacuation and cluster-recovery fixes already threaded through 7.4 suggest the gaps are in cluster-wide orchestration, not the transfer itself.

◆Recent moves

  1. 24d ago

    Incus 7.4 adds near-live migration and Secure Boot key management

    ⚡ SPARK

    The migration thread running through 7.2 and 7.3 arrives as a feature: near-live migration on both client and server, covering dependent disks within a cluster. The VM surface builds out in the same release with Secure Boot key management, NVRAM control and per-device burst limits.

    View source ↗
  2. 1mo ago

    Native Windows and macOS installers; QMP command timeouts

    Native Windows and macOS installers join the build workflow, QMP commands gain a timeout, and OCI containers accept /32 and /128 addresses. The native installers are the notable part — they widen who can drive an Incus server without a Linux client.

    View source ↗
  3. 2mo ago

    First patch release on the 7.0 LTS branch

    The first patch on the 7.0 LTS branch. The body is a changelog link with no described changes.

    View source ↗
  4. 2mo ago

    Migration-compatible hypervisor flags for stateful migration

    Adds migration-compatible hypervisor flags when migration.stateful is set, aligns node-specific network configuration, and fixes block backup issues. In hindsight this is the groundwork the near-live migration in 7.4 was built on.

    View source ↗
  5. 3mo ago

    Fixes for issues surfaced by the 7.0 release

    A cleanup release for issues surfaced by 7.0: project targeting on delete, network ACLs across projects, a deprecated QEMU flag, and operation creation during shutdown evacuation.

    View source ↗
  6. 4mo ago

    Incus 7.0 LTS, with runtime-detected QEMU feature gating

    The 7.0 LTS baseline. SPICE, 9p and virtio audio support are gated on runtime QMP detection rather than assumed, OIDC authentication can skip blocking, and the agent loader moves to Linux architecture names.

    View source ↗