lxd VS LXC

Compare lxd vs LXC and see what are their differences.

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lxd LXC
6 7
4,228 4,439
0.5% 0.7%
10.0 9.2
1 day ago 24 days ago
Go C
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

lxd

Posts with mentions or reviews of lxd. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-07-06.
  • Canonical re-licenses LXD under AGPLv3, slaps a CLA on top
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Dec 2023
    Please correct me if I'm wrong, but the post also links the "add Canonical CLA check #12665" [0], and my understanding is that "retain copyright" here is like a typical forum agreement where you going forward must agree to a perpetual worldwide unlimited license to Canonical that they can use as they please per [1]:

    >In effect, you’re giving us a licence, but you still own the copyright — so you retain the right to modify your code and use it in other projects.

    You explicitly do retain ownership, so you can then take that same code and contribute it elsewhere under any license you wish. The same author could contribute the same patch to both the LXD and the Incus fork. But some might object to being required to allow Canonical to specially license as they want.

    So your characterization seems unfair, and then gets kind of nasty at the end:

    >The author is pissed off because he can't build custom versions without redistributing the modifications

    Incus is a full fork, and Canonical has apparently been taking changes back from it as well as is often the case with such forks where both sides get value from each other. It's perfectly understandable for some folks to be bummed if that's no longer the case, and there is nothing evil about the Apache2 license. There's plenty of history that in OSS going back to the beginning, no need for insinuations or attacks.

    ----

    0: https://github.com/canonical/lxd/pull/12665/commits/eb5c773d...

    1: https://ubuntu.com/legal/contributors

  • Vm and hypervisor
    1 project | /r/homelab | 10 Dec 2023
    You could consider LXD which lets you easily run both containers and VMs: https://ubuntu.com/lxd
  • LXD Moves into Canonical
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Jul 2023
    I hope this doesn't affect LXC negatively.

    LXC and LXD share plenty of contributors.

    https://github.com/lxc/lxc/graphs/contributors

    https://github.com/canonical/lxd/graphs/contributors

    I use an "unprivileged LXC container" setup on several Debian bullseye hosts. It works fantastic, and each LXC container feels like a real server.

    Compare that to Docker's "one-container-one-process" philosophy, reinventing the wheel by awkwardly composing multiple containers.

  • LXD Has been moved to Canonical
    1 project | /r/LXD | 6 Jul 2023
    [1] https://linuxcontainers.org/lxd/
    1 project | /r/opensource | 5 Jul 2023
  • LXD is now under Canonical
    3 projects | /r/LXD | 4 Jul 2023
    The expected changes are: - https://github.com/lxc/lxd will now become https://github.com/canonical/lxd - https://linuxcontainers.org/lxd will disappear and be replaced with a mention directing users to https://ubuntu.com/lxd - The LXD YouTube channel will be handed over to the Canonical team - The LXD section on the LinuxContainers community forum will slowly be sunset in favor of the Ubuntu Discourse forum run by Canonical - The LXD CI infrastructure will be moved under Canonical’s care - Image building for Linux Containers will no longer be relying on systems provided by Canonical, limiting image building to x86_64 and aarch64.

LXC

Posts with mentions or reviews of LXC. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-07-06.
  • LXD Moves into Canonical
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Jul 2023
    I hope this doesn't affect LXC negatively.

    LXC and LXD share plenty of contributors.

    https://github.com/lxc/lxc/graphs/contributors

    https://github.com/canonical/lxd/graphs/contributors

    I use an "unprivileged LXC container" setup on several Debian bullseye hosts. It works fantastic, and each LXC container feels like a real server.

    Compare that to Docker's "one-container-one-process" philosophy, reinventing the wheel by awkwardly composing multiple containers.

  • Support for Android apps
    2 projects | /r/vanillaos | 2 May 2023
    There is an issue with lxc as stated here: https://github.com/lxc/lxc/issues/4283 and https://github.com/Vanilla-OS/apx/issues/118
  • LXC & AD
    1 project | /r/Proxmox | 17 Oct 2022
    I'm currently attempting to enroll my Ubuntu (20.04) (Unprivileged) LXC hosts to my windows AD server but am having difficulty. I'm using SSSD and KRB5 to manage the user directory and authentication. Once joining the domain with realmd, all seems ok, I can use the id command, etc to lookup users and groups and the host appears in Windows Users and Computers. The issue I'm having is with authentication, I believe it to be related to this issue however I don't entirely understand the solution and can't seem to find much else on the matter (Note the method I'm using works fine on full VMs). Would anybody please be able to provide more clarity in layman's terms?
  • LXC and LXD: a different container story
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Sep 2022
    I don't recall having to do any uid/gid fixup last time I made an unprivileged container. I did have to prepare the unprivileged host user, of course, by reserving a range of subordinate uids/gids (/etc/sub?id) and configuring a virtual network interface limit (/etc/lxc/lxc-usernet).

    To create the container, I did this:

    lxc-create -t download -n -- -d debian -r bullseye -a amd64

    Note that this runs the 'download' template, which (IIRC) is better suited to unprivileged containers than the 'debian' template is. The 'download' template will list its available distros if you do this:

    lxc-create -t download -n -- --list

    Note that some versions of lxc-create may fail with a keyserver error because sks-keyservers.net died somewhat recently. Workaround: DOWNLOAD_KEYSERVER=hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com lxc-create

    https://github.com/lxc/lxc/issues/3894

  • Lxc container still gives Cannot open TUN/TAP dev /dev/net/tun: Operation not permitted after following graysky's edit of wiki
    1 project | /r/archlinux | 1 Jan 2022
    Found this issue and edited the config file of the lxc container:
  • How to - Create LXC containers FROM Docker and OCI images
    2 projects | /r/LXD | 6 Nov 2021
    and on this thread... an different approach is described
  • Finally joining the club
    1 project | /r/Proxmox | 17 Mar 2021
    https://github.com/lxc/lxc/issues/1629#issuecomment-311379508

What are some alternatives?

When comparing lxd and LXC you can also consider the following projects:

kubevirt - Kubernetes Virtualization API and runtime in order to define and manage virtual machines.

Portainer - Making Docker and Kubernetes management easy.

kata-containers - Kata Containers is an open source project and community working to build a standard implementation of lightweight Virtual Machines (VMs) that feel and perform like containers, but provide the workload isolation and security advantages of VMs. https://katacontainers.io/

Docker Compose - Define and run multi-container applications with Docker

podman - Podman: A tool for managing OCI containers and pods.

Docker - Notary is a project that allows anyone to have trust over arbitrary collections of data

firecracker-container

Docker Swarm - Source repo for Docker's Documentation

firecracker-containerd - firecracker-containerd enables containerd to manage containers as Firecracker microVMs

Dokku - A docker-powered PaaS that helps you build and manage the lifecycle of applications

lxdui - LXDUI is a web UI for the native Linux container technology LXD/LXC

Harbor - An open source trusted cloud native registry project that stores, signs, and scans content.