The Problem Incus 7.4 Solves
Migrating a live container has always been painful. The traditional approach — stop the container, copy its filesystem, restart it on the destination — means downtime measured in minutes, not seconds, especially when the container's data set is large. For production environments, this friction is a real operational cost.
Incus 7.4, released August 30, 2026, changes that for users on ZFS or Btrfs storage. The new near-live migration approach keeps the container running while Incus repeatedly transfers incremental filesystem snapshots to the destination. When the delta between snapshots is small enough, Incus performs a final sync — the container is paused only for that last transfer — then immediately restarts on the new host. The window of actual downtime shrinks from minutes to seconds.
How to Use It
The feature is surfaced through the --refresh flag on incus move. The same approach applies both within a single Incus cluster and between separate remote servers. A companion option, refresh-migrate, was also added to cluster.evacuate, meaning you can use the same near-live method when draining a cluster node for maintenance.
One important limitation: the feature only works with ZFS and Btrfs. Both filesystems support efficient snapshot-and-diff operations that make incremental transfer practical. Other storage backends lack the same mechanism, so the conventional migration path remains unchanged for those setups.
Security Fixes Bundled in This Release
Incus 7.4 also patches two medium-severity CVEs. CVE-2026-81500 addressed a client-side path traversal issue, and CVE-2026-81501 fixed a problem with private image imports. Users running earlier versions should update regardless of whether they intend to use the new migration feature.
The release also extends UEFI Secure Boot tooling with a new incus low-level secureboot command set for managing database entries, and adds burst limit controls for VM disk I/O — useful for environments where multiple VMs share storage and one workload can saturate the available throughput.
What Incus Is
For context: Incus is a community fork of LXD that emerged after Canonical moved LXD under exclusive control in 2023. The project is maintained under the Linux Containers umbrella by Stéphane Graber and has moved at a steady release cadence, adding significant features since the fork. The 7.0 LTS branch released earlier in 2026 cemented its position as the de facto open-source choice for system container and VM management on Linux.
Near-live migration is the kind of feature that doesn't make headlines for most users — until the day you need it. Incus 7.4 makes that day significantly less painful.