The Incus team has announced version 6.22 of its container and virtual machine manager, a community-driven fork of LXD developed following Canonical’s change to LXD’s governance.
A key update is the addition of vsock support for the Windows VM agent. With signed Virtio vsock drivers and Go support on Windows, Incus now uses vsock instead of TCP for communication between Windows VMs. This aligns Windows behavior with Linux and simplifies management when VM IP addresses are unavailable.
Backup handling is improved with direct backup streaming. incus export and related commands now stream data directly, eliminating temporary disk backups and reducing storage overhead.
And something very useful – snapshot management now includes disk-only restore, allowing administrators to revert only the storage state of an instance without affecting configuration or runtime metadata.
Storage enhancements include expanded support for QCOW2, default QCOW2 formatting for custom block volumes, and improved snapshot handling. For lvmcluster users, Incus 6.22 adds storage pool resizing and an option to automatically remove newer snapshots when restoring older ones.
Cluster operations now offer improved visibility with new member states, including EVACUATING and RESTORING, and the ability to restore a node without automatically migrating instances back.
The incus-migrate tool now supports URL-based image imports to directly ingest remote QCOW2 or VMDK images. ACME certificates now support multiple domains, allowing a comma-separated list for HTTPS configuration.
Additional enhancements include full USB controller passthrough via unix-hotplug, a security.trusted option for SR-IOV NICs, dedicated log storage volumes, expanded certificate data in authorization scriptlets, image server restrictions for projects, and new instance boot time metrics.
For more information about the Incus 6.22 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.
