systemd-machined.service(8) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | SEE ALSO | NOTES | COLOPHON

SYSTEMD-....SERVICE(8)  systemd-machined.service  SYSTEMD-....SERVICE(8)

NAME         top

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

SYNOPSIS         top

       systemd-machined.service

       /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-machined

DESCRIPTION         top

       systemd-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 ps(1) will show to which machine a specific
           process belongs in a column of its own, and so will
           gnome-system-monitor[1] or systemd-cgls(1).

       •   systemd's various tools (systemctl(1), journalctl(1),
           loginctl(1), hostnamectl(1), timedatectl(1), localectl(1),
           machinectl(1), ...) support the -M 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 --recursive 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-bus(3) library exposes the
           sd_bus_open_system_machine(3) call to connect to the system
           bus of any registered container.

       •   The nss-mymachines(8) module makes sure all registered
           containers can be resolved via normal glibc gethostbyname(3)
           or getaddrinfo(3) calls.

       See systemd-nspawn(1) 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[2]. Also see the New Control Group
       Interfaces[3].

       The daemon provides both a C library interface (which is shared
       with systemd-logind.service(8)) as well as a D-Bus 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. For more information please consult sd-login(3) and
       org.freedesktop.machine1(5) and org.freedesktop.LogControl1(5).

       A small companion daemon systemd-importd.service(8) 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[4], and thus may be
       resolved with userdbctl(1) or the usual glibc NSS calls.

SEE ALSO         top

       systemd(1), machinectl(1), systemd-nspawn(1), nss-mymachines(8),
       systemd.special(7)

NOTES         top

        1. gnome-system-monitor
           https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-system-monitor/

        2. Writing Virtual Machine or Container Managers
           https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/writing-vm-managers

        3. New Control Group Interfaces
           https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/ControlGroupInterface

        4. User/Group Record Lookup API via Varlink
           https://systemd.io/USER_GROUP_API

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the systemd (systemd system and service
       manager) project.  Information about the project can be found at
       ⟨http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd⟩.  If you have
       a bug report for this manual page, see
       ⟨http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/#bugreports⟩.
       This page was obtained from the project's upstream Git repository
       ⟨https://github.com/systemd/systemd.git⟩ on 2023-12-22.  (At that
       time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in the
       repository was 2023-12-22.)  If you discover any rendering
       problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there
       is a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
       corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
       (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
       man-pages@man7.org

systemd 255                                       SYSTEMD-....SERVICE(8)

Pages that refer to this page: busctl(1)machinectl(1)systemd-nspawn(1)userdbctl(1)sd_bus_default(3)sd_bus_set_address(3)sd_machine_get_class(3)sd_pid_get_owner_uid(3)org.freedesktop.import1(5)org.freedesktop.machine1(5)systemd.slice(5)systemd.directives(7)systemd.index(7)nss-mymachines(8)nss-systemd(8)systemd-importd.service(8)