machinectl may be used to introspect and control the state of the
systemd(1) virtual machine and container registration manager
systemd-machined.service(8).
machinectl may be used to execute operations on machines and
images. Machines in this sense are considered running instances
of:
• Virtual Machines (VMs) that virtualize hardware to run full
operating system (OS) instances (including their kernels) in
a virtualized environment on top of the host OS.
• Containers that share the hardware and OS kernel with the
host OS, in order to run OS userspace instances on top the
host OS.
• The host system itself.
Machines are identified by names that follow the same rules as
UNIX and DNS hostnames. For details, see below.
Machines are instantiated from disk or file system images that
frequently — but not necessarily — carry the same name as
machines running from them. Images in this sense may be:
• Directory trees containing an OS, including the top-level
directories /usr/, /etc/, and so on.
• btrfs subvolumes containing OS trees, similar to regular
directory trees.
• Binary "raw" disk image files containing MBR or GPT partition
tables and Linux file systems.
• Similarly, block devices containing MBR or GPT partition
tables and file systems.
• The file system tree of the host OS itself.
