LXC 2.0.0 released

LXC 2.0.0 release announcement 6th of April 2016

The LXC team is very pleased to announce the release of LXC 2.0!
Highlights

All main LXC commands have now been rewritten in C
lxc-ls
lxc-device
lxc-copy
New lxc-copy command taking over the role of lxc-clone and lxc-start-ephemeral
Much improved support for checkpoint/restore of containers
Completely reworked cgroup handling including support for the cgroup namespace
The various command line tools are now much more consistent
Re-organized storage backend implementation, including addition of a Ceph RBD backend
An enormous amount of bugfixes, most of which will be backported to 1.0 and 1.1 over the next few bugfix releases
The C API remains backward compatible with previous versions and is released as 1.2

This release was made possible by contributions (720 commits) from a total of 96 contributors.
New configuration options

lxc.ephemeral: Controls whether the container is ephemeral and so will be destroyed on shutdown
lxc.rebootsignal: Allows to override the signal sent for container reboot
lxc.hook.destroy: New hook being called on container destruction
lxc.hook.stop: Run in the host context with references to the containers just before namespace teardown
lxc.init_uid: Used by lxc-execute to set an alternative user
lxc.init_gid: Used by lxc-execute to set an alternative group
lxc.monitor.unshare: Allows unsharing the mount namespace prior to running any hook

New features

API:
API version is 1.2, fully backward compatible with 1.1 and 1.0
new symbols:
New migrate() symbol as an alternative to checkpoint() using a migrate_opts struct to simplify additions
python3
Support for passing the storage backend to create()
lua
Add support for get_ips()
Add support for get_interfaces()
Add support for rename()
Core:
cgfsng: New cgroup backend driver for recent Linux kernel
cgroup: Partial support for the new cgroup hierarchy
cgroup: Support for the cgroup namespace
checkpoint: Support checkpoint/restore of default LXC containers
checkpoint: Support checkpoint/restore of unprivileged containers
checkpoint: Support for the page server
config: lxc.aa_profile: Now supports an "unchanged" value
config: lxc.init_cmd: Now supports arguments
config: lxc.network.macvlan.mode: Added support for the "passthru" mode
config: lxc.rootfs.backend: Allows to override the storage backend (bypasses auto-detection)
config: New nesting.conf configuration file to setup container nesting
hooks: New LXC_CGNS_AWARE environment variable, set to 1 if LXC supports the cgroup namespace (the kernel however may not)
hooks: New LXC_SRC_NAME environment variable is set in clone hook with the original container name
hooks: New LXC_TARGET environment variable is set with the container goal (stop or reboot)
logging: Updated logging timestamps to be a bit more readable
lxc-usernet: Support for containers usning a veth interface without bridging
lxc-usernet: Support for group-based quotas (use the @ prefix)
network: The bridge interface MTU is now used as the default container interface MTU
start: The process title is now renamed to be easier to read
storage: New Ceph RBD storage backend
Documentation:
Korean translation of all the man pages
Commands:
lxc-attach: Use an intermediate pts device to prevent attacks against the parent shell
lxc-clone: Support for renaming containers
lxc-start-ephemeral: Support for changing bind-mount targets
Init systems:
systemd: Support for instanced service units
Templates
New ALTLinux template
New Slackware template
New SPARCLinux template
alpine: Support installing extra packages
debian: Default to just "main" enabled, allow enabling other repositories through argument
oracle: Set the timezone in the container
openssh: Add OpenSSH support
ubuntu: New -v option allowing the user to set the debootstrap variant
ubuntu-cloud: Support for vendor-data passthrough

Change in behavior

The lxc-autostart container startup order is now reversed (to be correct)
The new cgfsng cgroup backend is now the recommended backend
lxc.hook.post-stop failures are now fatal to container reboots

Note that several commands have been significantly reworked in this release.
We don't consider our command line tools as stable ABI so you may need to test and adapt your scripts,
or better, port them to use our stable C API or one of its bindings.
Deprecation warnings

The "lxc-clone" and "lxc-start-ephemeral" commands are now considered deprecated and to be replaced by the new lxc-copy.
Those commands can still be built by using the --enable-legacy flag, however note that they will print a warning when used
and that they will be removed from upcoming LXC releases.
Support

This is the second LXC Long Term Support release which we will be supporting until the 1st of June 2021.
LXC 1.0, our previous Long Term Support release, is still supported until the 1st of June 2019.
And lastly, the previous stable release, LXC 1.1 will go end of life on the 1st of September 2016.