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LXC 1.0.0 release announcement

20.02.2014

Introduction

It's with great pleasure that the LXC team is announcing the release of LXC 1.0!

This release is a significant milestone for us as it marks the first release we consider to be production ready.
It features a wide variety of improvements to container security, a consistent set of tools,
updated documentation and an API with multiple bindings.

Over 60 people contributed their time to this release, making it the best LXC release yet!
The result of all that work can be seen used in areas as diverse as individual laptops,
cellphones and cloud instances. And we are confident that with LXC 1.0, we will see LXC's usage expand even more
and be used for a lot of new and exciting projects.

Downloads

The release tarballs may be found on our download page and we expect most distributions
will very soon ship a packaged version of LXC 1.0.

Should you be interested in individual changes or just looking at the detailed development history,
our main repository is on GitHub.

New features

LXC 1.0 is the result of 10 months of development and over a thousand commits, including a major rework of the way LXC is structured.
It's therefore near impossible to come up with a comprehensive list of changes in this release,
however here are some highlights:

  • Support for fully unprivileged containers
  • Public stable API (liblxc1)
  • Official API bindings for lua and python3 (in tree)
  • Official API bindings for Go and Ruby (out of tree)
  • Flexible backingstore system with support for:
    • standard directories (default)
    • btrfs
    • zfs
    • lvm
    • loop devices
    • aufs
    • overlayfs
  • Support for cloning and snapshotting containers
  • A reduced but more complete set of command line tools
  • Updated, more complete documentation
  • A new way of creating containers based on centrally generated images
  • Templates letting you create containers running most popular distributions

A series of blog posts introducing you to LXC and highlighting some of LXC 1.0's new features may be found here.

LXC 1.0 moving forward

LXC 1.0 is the first production ready release of LXC and it comes with a commitment from upstream
to maintain it until at least Ubuntu 14.04 LTS reaches end of life in April 2019.
That's slightly over 5 years of support!

We will be maintaining a separate stable branch and will cherry-pick and backport fixes as appropriate.
It's expected that we will have frequent bugfix releases of 1.0 so distributions can simply use those
and save themselves the trouble of having to manually follow our stable branch.

Bug reports and contact information

Bug reports should be filed on GitHub or if you do not wish to create an account, by e-mail to the appropriate mailing-list.
The same goes for your patches. We tend to prefer patches sent to lxc-devel but we also accept pull request directly on GitHub.

LXC 1.0 is also the first release after the change of project maintainers which occurred in September 2013.
We'd like to thank Daniel Lezcano for all the great work and efforts he's put in LXC over the years
and wish him the best of luck in his new projects!

The current projects maintainers are Serge Hallyn, Stéphane Graber and Christian Brauner