systemd-machined.service(8)

1SYSTEMD-MACHINED.SERVICE(8)systemd-machined.serviceSYSTEMD-MACHINED.SERVICE(8)
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NAME

6       systemd-machined.service, systemd-machined - Virtual machine and
7       container registration manager
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SYNOPSIS

10       systemd-machined.service
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12       /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-machined
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DESCRIPTION

15       systemd-machined is a system service that keeps track of locally
16       running virtual machines and containers.
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18       systemd-machined is useful for registering and keeping track of both OS
19       containers (containers that share the host kernel but run a full init
20       system of their own and behave in most regards like a full virtual
21       operating system rather than just one virtualized app) and full virtual
22       machines (virtualized hardware running normal operating systems and
23       possibly different kernels).
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25       systemd-machined should not be used for registering/keeping track of
26       application sandbox containers. A machine in the context of
27       systemd-machined is supposed to be an abstract term covering both OS
28       containers and full virtual machines, but not application sandboxes.
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30       Machines registered with machined are exposed in various ways in the
31       system. For example:
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33       •   Tools like ps(1) will show to which machine a specific process
34           belongs in a column of its own, and so will gnome-system-monitor[1]
35           or systemd-cgls(1).
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37       •   systemd's various tools (systemctl(1), journalctl(1), loginctl(1),
38           hostnamectl(1), timedatectl(1), localectl(1), machinectl(1), ...)
39           support the -M switch to operate on local containers instead of the
40           host system.
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42       •   systemctl list-machines will show the system state of all local
43           containers, connecting to the container's init system for that.
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45       •   systemctl's --recursive switch has the effect of not only showing
46           the locally running services, but recursively showing the services
47           of all registered containers.
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49       •   The machinectl command provides access to a number of useful
50           operations on registered containers, such as introspecting them,
51           rebooting, shutting them down, and getting a login prompt on them.
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53       •   The sd-bus(3) library exposes the sd_bus_open_system_machine(3)
54           call to connect to the system bus of any registered container.
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56       •   The nss-mymachines(8) module makes sure all registered containers
57           can be resolved via normal glibc gethostbyname(3) or getaddrinfo(3)
58           calls.
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60       See systemd-nspawn(1) for some examples on how to run containers with
61       OS tools.
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63       If you are interested in writing a VM or container manager that makes
64       use of machined, please have look at Writing Virtual Machine or
65       Container Managers[2]. Also see the New Control Group Interfaces[3].
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67       The daemon provides both a C library interface (which is shared with
68       systemd-logind.service(8)) as well as a D-Bus interface. The library
69       interface may be used to introspect and watch the state of virtual
70       machines/containers. The bus interface provides the same but in
71       addition may also be used to register or terminate machines. For more
72       information please consult sd-login(3) and org.freedesktop.machine1(5)
73       and org.freedesktop.LogControl1(5).
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75       A small companion daemon systemd-importd.service(8) is also available,
76       which implements importing, exporting, and downloading of container and
77       VM images.
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79       For each container registered with systemd-machined.service that
80       employs user namespacing, users/groups are synthesized for the used
81       UIDs/GIDs. These are made available to the system using the User/Group
82       Record Lookup API via Varlink[4], and thus may be resolved with
83       userdbctl(1) or the usual glibc NSS calls.
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NOTES

90        1. gnome-system-monitor
91           https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-system-monitor/
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93        2. Writing Virtual Machine or Container Managers
94           https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/writing-vm-managers
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96        3. New Control Group Interfaces
97           https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/ControlGroupInterface/
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99        4. User/Group Record Lookup API via Varlink
100           https://systemd.io/USER_GROUP_API
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104systemd 251                                        SYSTEMD-MACHINED.SERVICE(8)

NAME

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

SEE ALSO

NOTES