Requirements - Incus documentation
Description: Go: Incus requires Go 1.26 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...

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# Requirements

## Go

Incus requires Go 1.26 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 6.12.

Incus requires a kernel with support for:

- Control Groups (`blkio`, `cpuset`, `devices`, `freezer`, `memory` and `pids`)

- Namespaces (`cgroup`, `ipc`, `pid`, `mount`, `net`, `user` and `uts`)

- Seccomp

- Native Linux AIO (`io_setup(2)`, etc.)

The following optional features also require extra kernel options:

- AppArmor

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

- SELinux

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

## LXC

Incus requires LXC 6.0.0 or higher with the following build options:

- `apparmor` (if using Incus’ AppArmor support) (minimum version: 3.0.0)

- `seccomp`

- `selinux` (if using Incus’ SELinux support)

LXCFS is strongly recommended to properly report resource consumption inside the container.

## OCI

To run OCI containers, Incus currently relies on `skopeo` for registry interactions.

## QEMU

For virtual machines, QEMU 8.2 or higher is required.

When using `virtiofsd`, only the Rust rewrite of `virtiofsd` is supported.

## Network

Minimum versions for network related tooling:

- `nftables`: 1.0.0

- `dnsmasq`: 2.90

When using Incus with OVN networks, the minimum versions of OVS and OVN are:

- `openvswitch`: 3.3.0

- `ovn`: 24.03.0

## Storage

Minimum versions for storage drivers:

- `zfs`: 2.1.0

- `lvm`: 2.03.11

- `linstor-drbd`: 9.0

- `truenas-incus-ctl`: 0.7.7

## Additional libraries (and development headers)

Incus uses `cowsql` for its database, to build and set it up, you can run `make deps`.

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

- `libacl1`

- `libcap2`

- `libuv1` (for `cowsql`)

- `libsqlite3` >= 3.25.0 (for `cowsql`)

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