What's IncusOS?

IncusOS is built on top of Debian 13 with our own Incus and kernel builds.

In addition to running Incus itself, IncusOS can also be used as the underlying OS to run Operations Center and Migration Manager, allowing for an easy migration from a VMware or similar environment over to Incus.

We make extensive use of systemd's modern OS features to build our images, handle updates and take care of things like first boot partitioning and TPM backed disk encryption.

We currently maintain two update channels for IncusOS:

All installations default to the stable channel which typically sees at least one weekly update to pick up the latest stable bugfix release of the Linux kernel as well as any relevant security issues.

The testing channel sees much more frequent builds, typically once a day.

IncusOS systems default to checking for updates every 6 hours and will automatically update Incus itself with a very short API downtime (no impact to running instances) and will stage any OS update to be booted upon reboot.

Configuration options are available to change the update frequency or disable automatic updates altogether as well as specifying scheduled downtime periods to apply the application updates.

IncusOS's development is done on Github at https://github.com/lxc/incus-os

The IncusOS project is made partly of configuration files to drive mkosi which is used to build our images and partly of our own Go code for the OS management daemon and related tools.

All code is releasd under the Apache 2.0 license.