WHY does Incus add a default 10GB drive every time?

It’s my understanding that the root volume is an upstream requirement of Incus.

I couldn’t find the original post myself, but @Foxtrot314 shared the following quote from the main Incus dev

The root disk must always exist and is the only one that gets snapshotted, backed up and moved around as part of the instance.

For VMs, you can make it tiny and never use it, instead relying on external disks (custom block volumes) for everything, but you can’t fully remove the root disk as it’s assumed by a lot of different code paths to be present.

I still wonder why we are forced to a 10 GB size when we import a zvol. However, if you use a Linux image, you can set the root disk size, but it is still forced to a 5 GB minimum.


EDIT