1SYSTEMD-MACHINED.SERVICE(8)systemd-machined.serviceSYSTEMD-MACHINED.SERVICE(8)
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6 systemd-machined.service, systemd-machined - Virtual machine and
7 container registration manager
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10 systemd-machined.service
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12 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-machined
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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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86 systemd(1), machinectl(1), systemd-nspawn(1), nss-mymachines(8),
87 systemd.special(7)
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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)