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Linux Containers Developers Kernel: Virtuozzo , IBM , Google , Eric Biederman and others Userspace: Daniel Lezcano, Serge Hallyn, Stéphane Graber and others Release August 6, 2008 ; 17 years ago  ( 2008-08-06 ) [ 1 ] Stable release 6.0.6 [ 2 ]   / 27 February 2026 ; 3 months ago  ( 27 February 2026 ) Written in C , Shell Operating system Linux Platform x86 , IA-64 , PowerPC , SPARC , Itanium , ARM Type OS-level virtualization License GNU LGPL v.2.1 (some components under GNU GPL v2 and BSD ) Website linuxcontainers .org   Repository github .com /lxc Linux Containers ( LXC ) is an operating system-level virtualization method for running multiple isolated Linux systems (containers) on a control host using a single Linux kernel. The Linux kernel provides the cgroups functionality that allows limitation and prioritization of resources (CPU, memory, block I/O, network, etc.) without the need for starting any virtual machines , and also the namespace isolation functionality that allows complete isolation of an application's view of the operating environment, including process trees, networking , user IDs and mounted file systems . [ 3 ] LXC combines the kernel's cgroups and support for isolated namespaces to provide an isolated environment for applications. [ 4 ] Early versions of Docker used LXC as the container execution driver, [ 4 ] though LXC was replaced as the default in version 0.9.0 [ 5 ] [ 6 ] and was deprecated in 1.8.0, [ 7 ] before the driver was removed in 1.10.0. [ 8 ] Overview [ edit ] LXC was initially developed by IBM , as part of a collaboration between several parties looking to add namespaces to the kernel. [ 9 ] It provides operating system-level virtualization through a virtual environment that has its own process and network space, instead of creating a full-fledged virtual machine . LXC relies on the Linux kernel cgroups functionality [ 10 ] that was released in version 2.6.24. It also relies on other kinds of namespace isolation functionality, which were developed and integrated into the mainline Linux kernel. Security [ edit ] Originally, LXC containers were not as secure as other OS-level virtualization methods such as OpenVZ : in Linux kernels before 3.8, the root user of the guest system could run arbitrary code on the host system with root privileges, just as they can in chroot jails. [ 11 ] Starting with the LXC 1.0 release, it is possible to run containers as regular users on the host using "unprivileged containers". [ 12 ] Unprivileged containers are more limited in that they cannot access hardware directly. However, even privileged containers should provide adequate isolation in the LXC 1.0 security model, if properly configured. [ 12 ] Alternatives [ edit ] LXC is similar to other OS-level virtualization technologies on Linux such as OpenVZ and Linux-VServer , as well as those on other operating systems such as FreeBSD jails , AIX Workload Partitions and Solaris Containers . In contrast to OpenVZ, LXC works in the vanilla Linux kernel requiring no additional patches to be applied to the kernel sources. Version 1 of LXC, which was released on 20 February 2014 as a long-term supported version, was supported for five years. [ 13 ] Version 4.0 of LXC 4.0 was supported until June 1, 2025 and LXC 5.0 will be until June 1, 2027. [ 14 ] LXD [ edit ] LXD is an alternative Linux container manager, written in Go . It is built on top of LXC and aims to provide a better user experience. [ 15 ] It is a container hypervisor providing an API to manage LXC containers. [ 16 ] The LXD project was started in 2015 and was sponsored from the start by Canonical Ltd. , the company behind Ubuntu . On 4 July 2023, the LinuxContainers project announced that Canonical had decided to take over the LXD project but a fork called Incus had been created. [ 17 ] [ 18 ] On August 25, 2023, LXD version 5.17 was officially released under the control of Canonical, providing support for OpenZFS 2.2 delegation capabilities. [ 19 ] See also [ edit ] Free and open-source software portal Linux portal Open Container Initiative Container Linux (formerly CoreOS Linux) Docker , a project automating the deployment of applications inside software containers Apache Mesos , a retired large-scale cluster management platform based on container isolation Operating system-level virtualization implementations Proxmox Virtual Environment , an open-source server virtualization management platform supporting LXC containers and KVM Anbox , uses LXC to execute Android applications in other Linux distributions References [ edit ] ^ "Downloads" . Linux containers . Archived from the original on 2014-11-10 . Retrieved 2014-11-10 . ^ "LXC 6.0.6 LTS" . 27 February 2026 . Retrieved 27 February 2026 . ^ Rami Rosen (May 2013). "Resource management: Linux kernel namespaces and cgroups" (PDF) . CS . UCSB . Retrieved February 11, 2015 . ^ a b Kenlon, Seth (2020-01-30). "Exploring simple Linux containers with lxc" . Red Hat . IBM . Retrieved 2023-07-05 . ^ "Docker 0.9: introducing execution drivers and libcontainer" . Blog . Docker. 2014-03-10 . Retrieved 2018-05-09 . ^ "0.9.0" . Docker Engine prior releases . Docker. 2014-03-10 . Retrieved 2025-11-27 . ^ "1.8.0" . Docker Engine prior releases . Docker. 2015-08-11 . Retrieved 2025-11-27 . ^ "1.10.0" . Engine release notes . Docker. 2016-02-04 . Retrieved 2020-10-06 . ^ Webb, Jordan (2022-09-13). "LXC and LXD: a different container story" . LWN.net . Retrieved 2023-07-05 . ^ Koutoupis, Petros (2018-08-27). "Everything You Need to Know about Linux Containers, Part II: Working with Linux Containers (LXC)" . Linux Journal . Retrieved 2023-07-05 . ^ Marco, d'Itri (2011). "Evading from linux containers" . BOFH . IT. Archived from the original on 9 January 2014 . Retrieved 12 February 2014 . ^ a b Graber, Stéphane (1 January 2014). "LXC 1.0: Security features [6/10]" . Retrieved 12 February 2014 . However, at least in Ubuntu, our default containers ship with what we think is a pretty good configuration of both the cgroup access and an extensive apparmor profile which prevents all attacks that we are aware of. [...] LXC is no longer running as root so even if an attacker manages to escape the container, he'd find himself having the privileges of a regular user on the host ^ Graber, Stéphane (2013-12-20). "LXC 1.0: Your first Ubuntu container" . St. Graber . Retrieved 2014-02-23 . ^ "LXC" . Linux containers . Retrieved 2023-02-07 . ^ "Introduction" . LXD . Linux Containers . Retrieved 2020-04-14 . ^ Parrott, Thomas. "Introduction to LXD projects" . Ubuntu . Canonical . Retrieved 2023-07-05 . ^ "LXD Has been moved to Canonical" . Linux Containers . 2023-07-04. Archived from the original on 2023-07-04 . Retrieved 2023-07-05 . ^ Rudra, Sourav (2023-07-05). "The LXD Project Finds a New Home at Canonical" . It’s Foss . Retrieved 2023-07-05 . ^ Parrott, Thomas (25 August 2023). "LXD 5.17 has been released" . Ubuntu . Canonical. External links [ edit ] Official website and Lxc on GitHub IBM developerworks article about LXC "Evading from Linux Containers" by Marco D'Itri Presentation about cgroups and namespaces, the underlying technology of Linux containers, by Rami Rosen Presentation about Linux Containers and the future cloud, by Rami Rosen LXC : Install and configure the Linux Containers LSS: Secure Linux containers (LWN.net) Introduction to Linux Containers LXC on Android on YouTube , April 2013 v t e Virtualization software Comparison of platform virtualization software Hardware ( hypervisors ) Native CP/CMS Hyper-V KVM oVirt LDoms / Oracle VM Server for SPARC Logical partition (LPAR) LynxSecure PikeOS Proxmox VE QNX SIMMON SmartOS VMware ESXi VMware vSphere vCloud VMware Infrastructure Xen XenServer XCP-ng z/VM Hosted Specialized Basilisk II Bochs Cooperative Linux DOSBox DOSEMU 86Box PCem PikeOS SheepShaver SIMH Windows on Windows Virtual DOS machine Win4Lin Independent bhyve Microsoft Virtual Server Parallels Workstation Extreme Parallels Desktop for Mac Parallels Server for Mac PearPC QEMU UTM VirtualBox Virtual Iron Virtual PC VMware Fusion VMware Server VMware Workstation Player Tools Ganeti System Center Virtual Machine Manager Virt-manager Operating system OS containers FreeBSD jail Linux-VServer LXC OpenVZ Solaris Containers sysjail Virtuozzo Workload Partitions Application containers Apptainer Distrobox Docker lmctfy Podman rkt Virtual kernel architectures Rump kernel User-mode Linux vkernel Related kernel features BrandZ cgroups chroot namespaces eBPF seccomp Orchestration Amazon ECS Kubernetes OpenShift Desktop Citrix Virtual Apps Citrix Virtual Desktops Omnissa Horizon Remote Desktop Services Virtual machine Application Ceedo Citrix Virtual Apps Dalvik InstallFree Microsoft App-V Remote Desktop Services Symantec Workspace Virtualization Turbo VMware ThinApp ZeroVM Network Distributed Overlay Virtual Ethernet (DOVE) Ethernet VPN (EVPN) NVGRE Open vSwitch Virtual security switch Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) Generic Network Virtualization Encapsulation (GENEVE) See also BlueStacks See also: List of emulators , List of computer system emulators v t e Linux kernel Organization Kernel Linux Foundation Linux Mark Institute Linus's law Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate Tux SCO disputes Linaro GNU GPL v2 menuconfig Supported computer architectures Version history Criticism Support Developers The Linux Programming Interface kernel.org LKML Linux conferences Users Linux User Group (LUG) People Werner Almesberger H. Peter Anvin Jens Axboe Moshe Bar Suparna Bhattacharya Andries Brouwer Rémy Card Alan Cox Matthew Garrett Avi Kivity Con Kolivas Greg Kroah-Hartman Robert Love David S. Miller Ingo Molnár Andrew Morton Hans Reiser Rusty Russell Shuah Khan Linus Torvalds Theodore Ts'o Stephen Tweedie Harald Welte Chris Wright Technical Debugging CRIU ftrace kdump Linux kernel oops SystemTap BPF eBPF Startup vmlinux System.map dracut initrd initramfs ABIs Linux Standard Base x32 ABI APIs Kernel System Call Interface POSIX ioctl select open read close sync … Linux-only futex epoll splice dnotify inotify readahead … In-kernel ALSA Crypto API io_uring DRM kernfs Memory barrier New API RCU Video4Linux IIO Userspace Daemons , File systems bpffs configfs devfs devpts debugfs FUSE hugetlbfs pipefs procfs securityfs sockfs sysfs tmpfs systemd udev Kmscon binfmt_misc Wrapper libraries C standard library glibc uClibc Bionic libhybris dietlibc EGLIBC klibc musl Newlib libcgroup libdrm libalsa libevdev libusb liburing Components Kernel modules BlueZ cgroups Console bcache Device mapper dm-cache dm-crypt DRM EDAC evdev Kernel same-page merging (KSM) LIO Framebuffer LVM KMS driver Netfilter Netlink nftables Network scheduler perf SLUB zram zswap Process and I/O schedulers : Brain Fuck Scheduler Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS) Earliest eligible virtual deadline first (EEVDF) Noop scheduler O(n) scheduler O(1) scheduler SCHED_DEADLINE SCHED_FIFO SCHED_RR Security Modules : AppArmor Exec Shield seccomp SELinux Smack Tomoyo Linux Linux PAM Device drivers 802.11 graphics Raw device initramfs KernelCare kexec kGraft kpatch Ksplice Variants Mainline Linux kernel Linux-libre High-performance computing INK Compute Node Linux SLURM Real-time computing RTLinux RTAI Xenomai PREEMPT_RT MMU -less μClinux PSXLinux Virtualization Hypervisor KVM Xen OS-level virtualization Linux-VServer Lguest LXC OpenVZ Other L4Linux User-mode Linux MkLinux coLinux Adoption Range of use Desktop Embedded Gaming Thin client: LTSP Server: LAMP LYME-LYCE Devices Adopters List of Linux adopters Linux portal Free and open-source software portal Category Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=LXC&oldid=1355182952 " Categories : Free virtualization software Linux containerization Linux Containers Linux kernel features Linux-only free software Operating system security Virtualization software for Linux Hidden categories: Articles with short description Short description matches Wikidata This page was last edited on 20 May 2026, at 10:32  (UTC) . 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