systemd systemd-vmspawn 1 systemd-vmspawn Spawn an OS in a virtual machine systemd-vmspawn OPTIONS ARGS systemd-vmspawn may be used to start a virtual machine from an OS image. In many ways it is similar to systemd-nspawn1, but it launches a full virtual machine instead of using namespaces. Note: on Ubuntu/Debian derivatives systemd-vmspawn requires the user to be in the kvm group to use the VSock options. The excess arguments are passed as extra kernel command line arguments using SMBIOS. The following options are understood: -i --image= Root file system disk image (or device node) for the virtual machine. --qemu-smp=SMP Configures the number of CPUs to start the virtual machine with. Defaults to 1. --qemu-mem=MEM Configures the amount of memory to start the virtual machine with. Defaults to 2G. --qemu-kvm=BOOL Configures whether to use KVM. If the option is not specified KVM support will be detected automatically. If true, KVM is always used, and if false, KVM is never used. --qemu-vsock=BOOL Configure whether to use VSock networking. If the option is not specified VSock support will be detected automatically. If yes is specified VSocks are always used, and vice versa if no is set VSocks are never used. --vsock-cid=CID Configure vmspawn to use a specific CID for the guest. If the option is not specified or an empty argument is supplied the guest will be assigned a random CID. Valid CIDs are in the range 3 to 4294967294 (0xFFFF_FFFE). CIDs outside of this range are reserved. --qemu-gui Start QEMU in graphical mode. --secure-boot=BOOL Configure whether to search for firmware which supports Secure Boot. If the option is not specified the first firmware which is detected will be used. If the option is set to yes then the first firmware with Secure Boot support will be selected. If no is specified then the first firmware without Secure Boot will be selected. -M --machine= Sets the machine name for this container. This name may be used to identify this container during its runtime (for example in tools like machinectl1 and similar). --load-credential=ID:PATH --set-credential=ID:VALUE Pass a credential to the container. These two options correspond to the LoadCredential= and SetCredential= settings in unit files. See systemd.exec5 for details about these concepts, as well as the syntax of the option's arguments. In order to embed binary data into the credential data for --set-credential=, use C-style escaping (i.e. \n to embed a newline, or \x00 to embed a NUL byte). Note that the invoking shell might already apply unescaping once, hence this might require double escaping! $ mkosi -d arch -p systemd -p linux --autologin -o image.raw -f build $ systemd-vmspawn --image=image.raw If an error occurred the value errno is propagated to the return code. If EXIT_STATUS is supplied by the running image that is returned. Otherwise EXIT_SUCCESS is returned. systemd1, mkosi1