Imported VM image reports as type container

[stephendotcarter]

I downloaded a VM image from linuxcontainers.

Selected this image:

incus image list images: | grep 2c576a7164bf                  
│ debian/13 (7 more)                       │ 2c576a7164bf │ yes    │ Debian trixie amd64 (20260917_05:24)                     │ x86_64       │ VIRTUAL-MACHINE │ 347.42MiB  │ 2026/09/17 01:00 IST │

Exported:

incus image export images:2c576a7164bf debian-13-vm

Add to Operations Center:

operations-center image incus add incus.tar.xz debian-13-vm.root

incus.tar.xz was the renamed file I got from the incus image export, no modifications.

Then trying to load it from Incus its reported as TYPE=container:

Not sure if I have missed a flag in one of the steps, but this has happened with multiple VM images.

[stgraber]

Is it a filename thing? does it expect the block itself to be a .qcow2?

[stephendotcarter]

The same image pulled from linuxcontainers and directly uploaded to Incus using incus image import incus.tar.xz debian-13-vm.root gives:

So maybe its the import logic on OC that thinks its a container?
I'll test more tomorrow.

[stgraber]

Yeah, Incus needs to parse the second file and depending on whether it's a tarball or a qcow2, will set the type accordingly.

Operations Center should have similar logic, but I wonder if rather than inspecting the actual uploaded file, it's instead just looking at the file extension and assuming that .qcow2 is a VM and anything else is a container.

[stephendotcarter]

So the file that came from incus image export is a qcow2:

# file debian-13-vm.root               
debian-13-vm.root: QEMU QCOW Image (v3), 4294967296 bytes (v3), 4294967296 bytes

If I rename it to debian-13-vm.qcow2 then Incus still sees it as a container image.

Based on this:

operations-center/internal/image/incus_service.go

Line 196 in 5bd4357

case "disk.qcow2":

If I rename it to disk.qcow2 then Incus sees it as all.
If I try to launch a VM with the image it works.

But just as a test, if I try to launch a container Incus reports:

• The requested image couldn't be found for instance type "container", but one was found for instance type "virtual-machine"

Should it be required that exact file names need to match when uploading?
For any image files that are being uploaded they would need to first be renamed.

Also, seems like something needs to be tidied up in the generation of the simple streams metadata?

[stgraber]

Operations Center should use the file detection logic from Incus instead of expecting exact naming.