Canonical has released version 1.14 of the multipass tool, designed to simplify the installation of various Ubuntu versions in virtual machines running on Linux, Windows, and macOS virtualization systems. Multipass allows developers to launch the required version of Ubuntu in a virtual machine with a single command, without additional configurations, for experiments or testing their applications. KVM is used to launch virtual machines in Linux, Hyper-V in Windows, and HyperKit in macOS. It is also possible to use VirtualBox. of virtual machines The project code is written in C++ and is distributed under the GPLv3 license. A snap package has been prepared for quick installation of multipass in Ubuntu.
Multipass automatically extracts the required operating system image and keeps it up to date. It can use cloud-init for configuration. It supports both mounting disk partitions in the virtual environment (using the 'multipass mount' command) and transferring individual files between the host system and the virtual machine (using the 'multipass transfer' command). Complete integration of the installed virtual machine with the main desktop is supported (application icons, system menu, and notifications are added).
Key Changes:
- A graphical interface has been added for interacting with multipass services, simplifying the management of virtual machines.
- The ability to add an external network bridge to an existing virtual machine instance has been implemented.
- An option has been added for forcibly stopping virtual machine instances: 'multipass stop —force '.
- Support for snapshots has been added for the VirtualBox backend, which were previously only available for QEMU and Hyper-V.
- Additional restrictions have been introduced when mounting directories from the host environment to guest systems. Protection against user ID collisions during mounting has been implemented.
- The size of the snap package has been reduced by 48% (from 122MB to 64MB).
- The POCO library has been used instead of gRPC when building vcpkg.
Source: opennet.ru
