Introduction After a bit over a year of hard work, the development team is very excited to announce general availability of IncusOS! IncusOS is a modern immutable OS image that’s specifically designed to run Incus. It provides atomic updates through an A/B update mechanism using distinct partitions and it enforces boot security through UEFI Secure Boot and a TPM 2.0 module. Under the hood, it’s built on a minimal Debian 13 base, using the Zabbly builds of both the Linux kernel, ZFS and Inc...
I know this is supposed to be compared with Vmware ESXi &or Proxmox but exclusively made for linux containers, so…
How well can it compare with MicroOS & CoreOS which rely podman instead?
I’ve never seen a detailed comparison between podman & incus in term of resource usage nor performance, just that podman supports docker compose & it’s images.
IncusOS supports OCI containers, which means it can run most docker containers natively. And LXC, and vms via QEMU/KVM.
I ended up writing so much that I made an essay long reply.
Sorry for the inconvince & wait…
Interesting. What would be an example of a docker container that would not run on IncusOS?
Edit: sorry, I misread the question. I haven’t run into any docker containers that don’t run on incus, but my testing is limited.
Well, I have run the homeassistant core docker, calibre web automated, and a bunch more.
One just needs to add the docker https path to its repository and the rest is just translating the options to the way incus starts these. (Sorry, I can’t exactly remember what incus uses to run these containers.)
Anyway, I can dig up some helpful documentation if you’re rally interested.
I moved to incus from proxmox nearly 18 months ago and I haven’t looked back.
I mean, if you have a couple bookmarks handy, I’m always down to learn, but don’t put yourself out. I’ve been interested in Incus, basically because it’s the next best, new thing. Admittedly, I have not yet plumbed all the depths of Docker, tho I have a solid working knowledge of how everything works, and I have dabbled with Kubernetes.
Though perhaps it is important to make the distinction clear:
Incus is the software that supports running OCI and LXC containers, and VMs. It is the functional equivalent to the Proxmox virtualisation suite, storage, network, image and container management and also the management web UI.
IncusOS tries to support this program for your bare-metal servers by providing an immutable OS underneath which hosts Incus but cannot be reached via shell access at all. It intends to form a super locked-down base from which to use Incus, but which also comes with preinstalled goodies such as ceph, linstore, zfs, and some service setups (afaik).
So the closest comparison to Proxmox currently is a simple Incus installation on a Debian bare-metal host. IncusOS I would argue is actually moving further away from that comparison with its locked down base and immutable nature.
In a way the project reminds me much more of TalosOS which creates a similarly locked down base environment to work with Kubernetes on top.
Yes, sorry. I meant incus, not incus os.
No worries, mostly thought I’d point it out to others reading who might be a little confused by the close naming scheme and don’t know exactly what tool provides which functions.
(And since I love incus but think for most people atm IncusOS is not the right choice)
Yes, that makes it more comparable to MicroOS, which does the same with podman.
MicroOS is based on a more mainstream system but it’s still immutable with transactional updates.
What I’m trying to ask is if the project’s goal / development is being more MicroOS or more Proxmox Linux? & whether it tries be a replacement or a different workflow all together?
I see that there’s a Migration Manager in beta as an install option to switch from vmware ESXi, so I wonder if other OS-level hypervisors are in the roadmap.