lima

Highlights:

• 🪟Experimentally support HCS driver for eliminating QEMU dependency (Windows hosts)
• 🍎Attach host block devices to VZ guests (macOS hosts)
• 🐧Experimentally support lima:shared, lima:host, and lima:bridged networks (Linux hosts)
• 🖥️limactl menu: an experimental menu-based user interface

Changes

• Windows host support:
• Experimentally support HCS driver (#5449 #5514, thanks to LFX mentee @mie313, and @unsuman)
• Support native Windows OpenSSH (#5298 #5299 #5300 #5337, thanks to @jandubois)
• Automatically append common tool directories (e.g., QEMU) to PATH (#5348, thanks to LFX mentee @mie313)

• Windows guest support:
• Support provision (#5263, thanks to LFX mentee @mie313)

• macOS guest support:
• Add osOpts.darwin.suppressFirstLoginSetup to skip the first-login Setup Assistant (#5336, thanks to @trodemaster)

• VZ:
• Support attaching host block devices (limactl start --block-device) (#5117, thanks to @pirate)
• Add audio.microphone to attach a capture stream (#5462, thanks to @iamstarkov)
• Add networkOpts.hostLoopback to block guest access to the host's loopback services (#5581, thanks to @ranacseruet)

• QEMU:
• Support nestedVirtualization with HVF (QEMU >= 11.1) (#5443, thanks to @sharanrajt)
• Implement limactl screenshot (#5478, thanks to @afbjorklund)

• krunkit:
• Warn when a read-only mount is requested (#5740)

• Networking:
• Experimentally support lima:shared, lima:host, and lima:bridged networks on Linux hosts, via the new lima-privileged-net helper (#5483 #5484 #5485 #5486 #5513 #5669, thanks to @unsuman)

• SSH:
• Verify the guest VM's SSH host key, even for locally forwarded ports (#5687)

• Port forwarding:
• Forward Unix sockets over gRPC instead of SSH (#5653, thanks to @KayleMaster)

• YAML:
• Add archVariant (--arch-variant) for selecting x86-64-v2/v3 images (#5335, thanks to @ekalinin)
• additionalDisks: support custom mountPoint and optional mounting (#5198, thanks to @ekalinin)
• copyToHost: add skipIfMissing (#5183, thanks to @afbjorklund)
• Warn when overlapping mounts are detected (#5748)

• limactl CLI:
• Add limactl menu, an experimental TUI for managing instances (#5330 #5629 #5668 ..., thanks to @Soumya-codr et al.)
• limactl without arguments now opens the menu on an interactive terminal
• Support stopping multiple instances with limactl stop (#5369, thanks to @MEETNANDA8107)
• limactl autostart enable: add --keep-alive (#5086, thanks to @resker)
• limactl shell --sync: add --sync-exclude and support the .limasyncignore file (#4917, thanks to @peschmae)
• Show the boot progress with an (N/total) counter (#4902 #5602, thanks to @mn-ram and @saswatsam786)

• MCP:
• Implement the replace tool for targeted file edits (#5540, thanks to @bonifaido)

• nerdctl:
• Update from v2.4.1 to v2.4.2 (#5703)

• Templates:
• Update the default Ubuntu (default, ubuntu, ...) to 26.10 (#5657)
• Update Fedora (fedora, podman, ...) to 45 (#5694m #5734, thanks to @kolyshin)
• Update openSUSE Leap (opensuse-leap) to 16.1 (#5735, thanks to @e-minguez)
• oraclelinux-8, centos-stream: Drop legacy BIOS configuration (#5710)
• k8s: Add a parameter for apt-proxy (#5251, thanks to @afbjorklund)
• k8s: Allow installing on the minimal image variant (#5385, thanks to @afbjorklund)
• k8s: Pin Kubernetes version to 1.37 (#5463, thanks to @afbjorklund)
• k8s: Accept an https:// URL when joining a node (#5559, thanks to @Sarthak-Shreshtha01)
• k3s: Add parameters for apt-proxy and registry (#5251, #5257 #5377, thanks to @afbjorklund)

• Release artifacts:
• Add SBOM artifacts (#5220, thanks to @afbjorklund)
• Add the JSON schema of lima.yaml (#5339 #5380, thanks to @afbjorklund)

• Security fixes:
• GHSA-566x-598w-h7w7 Guest can read host files as QEMU option ROMs loaded from limactl's cwd (800a96b14e96b5d2ceb20ab2602147c1e79224ea)