The Incus team has just announced the release of version 6.16 of its container & virtual machine manager, a community-driven fork of LXD, created after Canonical changed LXD’s governance and moved it under its umbrella.
The headline feature is the added support for TrueNAS as a new storage driver. Instead of managing ZFS volumes locally, Incus can now talk to the TrueNAS API, with iSCSI handling the volume export and connection back to the Incus host.
That means administrators can build out remote storage pools backed by TrueNAS and even use them across clusters, making live instance migration smoother since the actual data doesn’t need to move. One caveat, though—the feature depends on a pre-release version of TrueNAS Scale.
On the virtualization side, USB CD-ROM handling has been reworked. Previously, Incus relied on a basic USB mass storage driver; however, the implementation now delves deeper into the USB block transfer layer. In practice, this means attaching an ISO via USB shows up as a proper CD-ROM device inside the VM.
For users, the big win here is Windows installation: you can now boot directly from the install ISO and use VirtIO drivers without going through the extra step of repacking media with distrobuilder.
Container users also gain new options with support for tmpfs and tmpfs-overlay disks. These allow mounting ephemeral storage inside a container with configurable size, UID/GID ownership, and permissions.
Moreover, the overlay option takes it a step further by preserving the existing contents at the mount point while layering changes on top in memory. This should be especially useful for OCI-style containers where modifying “/etc/fstab” isn’t practical.
Finally, the CLI sees more flexibility for console management. Users can now set defaults, such as “console_type” (switching between VGA and text console), and provide a custom “console_spice_command,” allowing them to override how SPICE connections are launched.
For more information about the Incus 6.16 container and virtual machine manager changes, visit the release announcement or check out the full changelog.
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.
