Guest OS compatibility

Virtual machines

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

Containers

Unlike virtual machines, container guests rely on the host’s kernel for execution. Since each Linux distribution ships with a unique set of features supported by their official kernels, the possibilities are almost endless. As such, the following compatibility table focuses on hosts running Ubuntu LTS releases with LXD 5.21/stable and Ubuntu releases as container guests. The main compatibility factor is the cgroup version required by the container and supported by the host.

Host OS / Guest OS	Ubuntu 16.04 LTS	Ubuntu 18.04 LTS	Ubuntu 20.04 LTS	Ubuntu 22.04 LTS	Ubuntu 24.04 LTS	Ubuntu 24.10
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS 5.4.0 [10]	🟢	🟢	🟢	🟢	🟢	❌ [11]
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS 5.15.0 (HWE)	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	🟢 [12]
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0	🟢 [13]	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 6.8.0 (HWE)	🟢 [13]	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.8.0	🟢 [13]	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅

Legend

Icon
recommended	✅
supported	🟢
not applicable	➖
not supported	❌

Instance options