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

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

SYNOPSIS
       systemd-machined.service

       /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-machined

DESCRIPTION
       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 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-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
       systemd(1), machinectl(1), systemd-nspawn(1), nss-mymachines(8),
       systemd.special(7), org.freedesktop.machine1(5), ssh(1)

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

	2. Writing Virtual Machine or Container Managers
	   https://systemd.io/WRITING_VM_AND_CONTAINER_MANAGERS

	3. New Control Group Interfaces
	   https://systemd.io/CONTROL_GROUP_INTERFACE

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

systemd 258					   SYSTEMD-MACHINED.SERVICE(8)