Guest OS compatibility

The following operating systems (OS) were tested as virtual machine guest running on top of on LXD 5.21/stable. Each OS was tested by doing a manual installation using the official ISO as provided by the vendor.

OS vendor	OS version	OS support	LXD agent	VirtIO-SCSI	VirtIO-BLK	NVMe	CSM (BIOS)	UEFI	Secure Boot
CentOS	CentOS 6.10 [1]	EOL	❌ [2]	✅	❌ [6]	🟢	✅	❌	❌
CentOS	CentOS 7.9	EOL	❌ [2]	✅	🟢	🟢	🟢	✅	✅
CentOS	CentOS 8.5	EOL	✅	✅	🟢	🟢	🟢	✅	✅
CentOS	CentOS 8-Stream	EOL	✅	✅	🟢	🟢	🟢	✅	✅
CentOS	CentOS 9-Stream	Supported	✅	✅	🟢	🟢	🟢	✅	✅
Red Hat	RHEL 7.9	EOL	❌ [2]	✅	🟢	🟢	🟢	✅	✅
Red Hat	RHEL 8.10	Supported	✅	✅	🟢	🟢	🟢	✅	✅
Red Hat	RHEL 9.4	Supported	✅	✅	🟢	🟢	🟢	✅	✅
SUSE	SLES 12 SP5	Supported	✅	✅	🟢	🟢	🟢	✅	✅
SUSE	SLES 15 SP6	Supported	✅	✅	🟢	🟢	🟢	✅	✅
Ubuntu	14.04.6 LTS	EOL	❌ [7]	✅	🟢	🟢	🟢	✅	✅
Ubuntu	16.04.7 LTS	ESM	✅ [8][9]	✅	🟢	🟢	🟢	✅	✅
Ubuntu	18.04.6 LTS	ESM	✅ [9]	✅	🟢	🟢	🟢	✅	✅
Ubuntu	20.04.6 LTS	Supported	✅	✅	🟢	🟢	🟢	✅	✅
Ubuntu	22.04.4 LTS	Supported	✅	✅	🟢	🟢	🟢	✅	✅
Ubuntu	24.04.1 LTS	Supported	✅	✅	🟢	🟢	🟢	✅	✅
Windows	Server 2012	Supported	➖	✅	🟢	❌	🟢	✅	✅
Windows	Server 2016	Supported	➖	✅	🟢	🟢 [3]	❌ [5]	✅	✅
Windows	Server 2019	Supported	➖	✅	🟢	🟢	❌ [5]	✅	✅
Windows	Server 2022	Supported	➖	✅	🟢	🟢	❌ [5]	✅	✅
Windows	10 22H2	Supported	➖	✅	🟢	🟢	❌ [5]	✅	✅
Windows	11 23H2 [4]	Supported	➖	✅	🟢	🟢	❌	✅	✅

Legend	Icon
recommended	✅
supported	🟢
not applicable	➖
not supported	❌

Notes

LXD agent

The LXD agent provides the ability to execute commands inside of the virtual machine guest without relying on traditional access solution like secure shell (SSH) or Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). This agent is only supported on Linux guests using systemd. For how to manually setup the agent, see Install the LXD agent into virtual machine instances.

CSM/BIOS boot

lxc config set v1 security.secureboot=false
lxc config set v1 security.csm=true

Virtual TPM

lxc config device add v1 vtpm tpm path=/dev/tpm0

VirtIO-BLK or NVMe

lxc config device override v1 root io.bus=virtio-blk
# or
lxc config device override v1 root io.bus=nvme

Disconnect the ISO

lxc config device remove v1 iso

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[1]

No network support despite having VirtIO-NET module.

[2] (1,2,3)

Support for 9P or virtiofs not available. Note: CentOS 7 has a kernel-plus kernel with 9P support allowing LXD agent to work (with selinux=0).

[3]

NVMe disks are visible but the installer lists all 255 namespaces slowing down the initialization.

[4]

A virtual TPM is required.

[5] (1,2,3,4)

The OS installer hangs when booting in CSM/BIOS mode.

[6]

The OS installer hangs when booting with VirtIO-BLK despite having VirtIO-BLK supported by the kernel.

[7]

This Linux version does not use systemd which the LXD agent requires.

[8]

Requires the HWE kernel (4.15) for proper vsock support which is required by the LXD agent.

[9] (1,2)

The lxd-agent-installer package is not available so lxd-agent has to be manually setup (see Install the LXD agent into virtual machine instances) or through cloud-init (see VM cloud-init).