Introduction

LXC is the current system-level virtualization method that is included in upstream Linux kernels. It is comparable to Linux vserver or OpenVZ.

There is a good LXC HOWTO, there is also some Debian specific documentation at http://wiki.debian.org/LXC. More LXC Documentation.

The new infrastructure host Infra01 uses LXC for hosting the actual infrastructure systems.

Creating containers

A script for creating LXC containers has been created it is available in SVN as lxc-setup in http://svn.cacert.org/CAcert/Sysadm/. The script can create new Debian containers in separate logical volumes. The container setup can be specified in a configuration file (example) or using command line options.

The lxc-setup script is able to create of empty containers with an empty root filesystem (see Issue 924).

It is also possible to use OpenVZ templates or other minimal Linux chroots as root filesystems.

Using existing systems for LXC

The LXC HOWTO contains instructions how existing file systems need to be modified (device files and init scripts) to be used as LXC containers.