Incus 7.0 LTS Container & Virtual Machine Manager Released

Incus 7.0 LTS has officially launched as the Linux Containers project’s second long-term support release for its container and virtual machine management platform. It succeeds Incus 6.0 LTS, which now moves into its final three years of security-only maintenance, while the new release will receive support until June 2031.

As a major update, Incus 7.0 LTS raises several minimum system requirements. Supported baselines now include Linux kernel 6.12, Go 1.25, QEMU 8.2, LXC 6.0, nftables 1.0, and dnsmasq 2.90. Optional integrations also require newer versions, including Open vSwitch 2.15, OVN 23.03, ZFS 2.1, and LVM 2.03.11, depending on the selected functionality.

The release also begins phasing out older technologies. Support for CGroup v1 and xtables-based firewall management through iptables, ip6tables, and ebtables has been deprecated. In addition, the Incus CLI has been refined to deliver more consistent command behavior. Security has also been strengthened, with fixes for nine vulnerabilities—seven classified as moderate and two as low severity.

One of the most significant architectural updates is the removal of MinIO as the storage bucket backend. Incus now includes its own built-in S3 listener, removing the need for an external dependency while maintaining S3 API compatibility. Existing storage buckets are automatically migrated to the new Incus-native format the first time they are accessed.

Cluster management has also improved with the addition of a new shutdown behavior. Using the core.shutdown_action setting, administrators can configure a node to evacuate workloads during shutdown, automatically relocating as many instances as possible to other cluster members instead of powering them down locally.

Virtual machine backup functionality has been enhanced through the introduction of a low-level NBD API and dirty bitmap APIs for more efficient change tracking.

Users upgrading from Incus 6.0 LTS will also gain access to several features introduced throughout the 6.x series that were not previously backported because they required substantial database or storage-format changes.

Among these is OCI image support, first added in Incus 6.3. This capability enables Incus to deploy application containers directly from OCI images while still applying standard container configurations such as resource limits and syscall interception.

Storage management receives multiple upgrades as well. Dependent storage volumes can now be directly attached to instances, ensuring they remain linked during snapshots, migrations, backups, and deletion processes.

The release further expands storage support with LINSTOR integration for DRBD-backed replicated storage, alongside a new TrueNAS driver that allows remote TrueNAS systems to function as storage pools through the TrueNAS API and iSCSI.

Networking capabilities have also been enhanced through the addition of network address sets, making ACL management easier by allowing administrators to reuse predefined IPv4 and IPv6 address groups across multiple network ACLs.

Finally, clustered environments now support CPU baseline definitions within cluster groups, enabling Incus to calculate or define common CPU feature sets across systems with mixed hardware configurations.

For more details, visit the release announcement or check out the full changelog.

Incus 7.0 LTS is released alongside LXC 7.0 LTS and LXCFS 7.0 LTS, completing this round of long-term support releases for Linux Containers. Users are encouraged to try out these new features by visiting the Incus online platform, which provides a hands-on experience with the latest version.