systemd-machined.servicesystemdsystemd-machined.service8systemd-machined.servicesystemd-machinedVirtual machine and container registration managersystemd-machined.service/usr/lib/systemd/systemd-machinedDescriptionsystemd-machined is a system service that keeps track of locally running virtual
machines and containers.systemd-machined is useful for registering and keeping track of both OS
containers (containers that share the host kernel but run a full init system of their own and behave in
most regards like a full virtual operating system rather than just one virtualized app) and full virtual
machines (virtualized hardware running normal operating systems and possibly different kernels).systemd-machined should not be used for registering/keeping
track of application sandbox containers. A machine in the context of
systemd-machined is supposed to be an abstract term covering both OS containers and
full virtual machines, but not application sandboxes.Machines registered with machined are exposed in various ways in the system. For example:
Tools like
ps1
will show to which machine a specific process belongs in a column of
its own, and so will
gnome-system-monitor or
systemd-cgls1.systemd's various tools
(systemctl1,
journalctl1,
loginctl1,
hostnamectl1,
timedatectl1,
localectl1,
machinectl1, ...)
support the switch to operate on local containers instead of the host system.
systemctl list-machines will show the system state of all local
containers, connecting to the container's init system for that.systemctl's switch has the effect of not only showing the
locally running services, but recursively showing the services of all registered containers.The machinectl command provides access to a number of useful
operations on registered containers, such as introspecting them, rebooting, shutting them down, and
getting a login prompt on them.The
sd-bus3 library
exposes the
sd_bus_open_system_machine3
call to connect to the system bus of any registered container.The
nss-mymachines8
module makes sure all registered containers can be resolved via normal glibc
gethostbyname3
or
getaddrinfo3
calls.See
systemd-nspawn1
for some examples on how to run containers with OS tools.If you are interested in writing a VM or container manager that makes use of machined, please have
look at Writing
Virtual Machine or Container Managers. Also see the New Control Group
Interfaces.The daemon provides both a C library interface
(which is shared with systemd-logind.service8)
as well as a D-Bus interface and a Varlink interface.
The library interface may be used to introspect and watch the state of virtual machines/containers.
The bus interface provides the same but in addition may also be used to register or terminate
machines. The Varlink interface may be used to register machines with optional extensions, e.g. with an
SSH key / address; it can be queried with
varlinkctl introspect /run/systemd/machine/io.systemd.Machine io.systemd.Machine.
For more information please consult
sd-login3
and
org.freedesktop.machine15
and
org.freedesktop.LogControl15.
A small companion daemon
systemd-importd.service8
is also available, which implements importing, exporting, and downloading of container and VM images.
For each container registered with systemd-machined.service that employs user
namespacing, users/groups are synthesized for the used UIDs/GIDs. These are made available to the system
using the User/Group Record Lookup API via
Varlink, and thus may be resolved with
userdbctl1 or the
usual glibc NSS calls.See Alsosystemd1machinectl1systemd-nspawn1nss-mymachines8systemd.special7org.freedesktop.machine15ssh1