Requirements

Go

LXD requires Go 1.23.3 or higher and is only tested with the Golang compiler.

We recommend having at least 2GiB of RAM to allow the build to complete.

Kernel requirements

The minimum supported kernel version is 5.15, but older kernels should also work to some degree.

LXD requires a kernel with support for:

  • Namespaces (pid, net, uts, ipc and mount)

  • Seccomp

  • Native Linux AIO (io_setup(2), etc.)

The following optional features also require extra kernel options or newer versions:

  • Namespaces (user and cgroup)

  • AppArmor (including Ubuntu patch for mount mediation)

  • Control Groups (blkio, cpuset, devices, memory, pids and net_prio)

  • CRIU (exact details to be found with CRIU upstream)

  • SKBPRIO/QFQ qdiscs (for limits.priority, minimum kernel 5.17)

As well as any other kernel feature required by the LXC version in use.

LXC

LXD requires LXC 5.0.0 or higher with the following build options:

  • apparmor (if using LXD’s AppArmor support)

  • seccomp

To run recent version of various distributions, including Ubuntu, LXCFS should also be installed.

QEMU

For virtual machines, QEMU 6.2 or higher is required. Some features like Confidential Guest support require a more recent QEMU and kernel version.

Hardware-assisted virtualization (Intel VT-x, AMD-V, etc) is required for running virtual machines. Additional hardware support (Intel VT-d, AMD-Vi) may be required for device pass-through.

ZFS

For the ZFS storage driver, ZFS 2.1 or higher is required. Some features like zfs_delegate requires 2.2 or higher to be used.

Additional libraries (and development headers)

LXD uses dqlite for its database, to build and set it up, you can run make deps.

LXD itself also uses a number of (usually packaged) C libraries:

  • libacl1

  • libcap2

  • liblz4 (for dqlite)

  • libuv1 (for dqlite)

  • libsqlite3 >= 3.37.2 (for dqlite)

Make sure you have all these libraries themselves and their development headers (-dev packages) installed.