"Scope" units are very much like service units, however with the
difference that they are created from pre-existing processes, rather
than processes that systemd itself forks off. This means they are
generated programmatically via the bus API as transient units rather
than from static configuration read from disk. Also, they do not provide
execution-time parameters, as at the time systemd adds the processes to
the scope unit they already exist and the parameters cannot be applied
anymore.
The primary benefit of this new unit type is to create arbitrary cgroups
for worker-processes forked off an existing service.
This commit also adds a a new mode to "systemd-run" to run the specified
processes in a scope rather then a transient service.
Transient units can be created via the bus API. They are configured via
the method call parameters rather than on-disk files. They are subject
to normal GC. Transient units currently may only be created for
services (however, we will extend this), and currently only ExecStart=
and the cgroup parameters can be configured (also to be extended).
Transient units require a unique name, that previously had no
configuration file on disk.
A tool systemd-run is added that makes use of this functionality to run
arbitrary command lines as transient services:
$ systemd-run /bin/ping www.heise.de
Will cause systemd to create a new transient service and run ping in it.
- This changes all logind cgroup objects to use slice objects rather
than fixed croup locations.
- logind can now collect minimal information about running
VMs/containers. As fixed cgroup locations can no longer be used we
need an entity that keeps track of machine cgroups in whatever slice
they might be located. Since logind already keeps track of users,
sessions and seats this is a trivial addition.
- nspawn will now register with logind and pass various bits of metadata
along. A new option "--slice=" has been added to place the container
in a specific slice.
- loginctl gained commands to list, introspect and terminate machines.
- user.slice and machine.slice will now be pulled in by logind.service,
since only logind.service requires this slice.
In order to prepare for the kernel cgroup rework, let's introduce a new
unit type to systemd, the "slice". Slices can be arranged in a tree and
are useful to partition resources freely and hierarchally by the user.
Each service unit can now be assigned to one of these slices, and later
on login users and machines may too.
Slices translate pretty directly to the cgroup hierarchy, and the
various objects can be assigned to any of the slices in the tree.
For "systemctl snapshot" it makes no sense to complete an incomplete
name with ".service" as we previously did, use ".snapshot" instead.
Also, don't bother with mount units or suchlike, we know that this must
be a snapshot and hence is the only sane way for completion.
This makes sure that
systemctl status /home
is implicitly translated to:
systemctl status /home.mount
Similar, /dev/foobar becomes dev-foobar.device.
Also, all characters that cannot be part of a unit name are implicitly
escaped.
Supposed to prevent creating unit files like:
├── dev-sda1.device.wants
│ └── .dot.mount -> /run/systemd/generator/.dot.mount
├── .dot.mount
from:
# cat /etc/fstab
/dev/sda1 /.dot vfat ro 1 3
which we later skip reading because of the leading '.'.
