diff --git a/doc/config-ref-rst/source/compute/hypervisor-lxc.rst b/doc/config-ref-rst/source/compute/hypervisor-lxc.rst
index 32c67f6b2a..d36196107f 100644
--- a/doc/config-ref-rst/source/compute/hypervisor-lxc.rst
+++ b/doc/config-ref-rst/source/compute/hypervisor-lxc.rst
@@ -1,3 +1,39 @@
 ======================
 LXC (Linux containers)
 ======================
+
+LXC (also known as Linux containers) is a virtualization technology that
+works at the operating system level. This is different from hardware
+virtualization, the approach used by other hypervisors such as KVM, Xen,
+and VMware. LXC (as currently implemented using libvirt in the Compute
+service) is not a secure virtualization technology for multi-tenant
+environments (specifically, containers may affect resource quotas for
+other containers hosted on the same machine). Additional containment
+technologies, such as AppArmor, may be used to provide better isolation
+between containers, although this is not the case by default.
+For all these reasons, the choice of this virtualization technology
+is not recommended in production.
+
+If your compute hosts do not have hardware support for virtualization,
+LXC will likely provide better performance than QEMU. In addition,
+if your guests must access specialized hardware, such as GPUs,
+this might be easier to achieve with LXC than other hypervisors.
+
+.. note::
+
+   Some OpenStack Compute features might be missing when running with LXC
+   as the hypervisor. See the `hypervisor support matrix
+   <http://wiki.openstack.org/HypervisorSupportMatrix>`_ for details.
+
+To enable LXC, ensure the following options are set in ``/etc/nova/nova.conf``
+on all hosts running the ``nova-compute`` service.
+
+.. code-block:: ini
+
+   compute_driver = libvirt.LibvirtDriver
+
+   [libvirt]
+   virt_type = lxc
+
+On Ubuntu, enable LXC support in OpenStack by installing the
+``nova-compute-lxc`` package.