systemd-vmspawn systemd systemd-vmspawn 1 systemd-vmspawn Spawn an OS in a virtual machine. systemd-vmspawn OPTIONS ARGS Description 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. Options The arguments are passed straight through to QEMU, extending its command line arguments. The following options are understood: Image Options Root file system disk image (or device node) for the virtual machine. Host Configuration SMP Configures the number of CPUs to start the virtual machine with. Defaults to 1. MEM Configures the amount of memory to start the virtual machine with. Defaults to 2G. Configure whether to use KVM. If the option is not specified KVM support will be detected automatically. If yes is specified KVM is always used, and vice versa if no is set KVM is never used. Start QEMU in graphical mode. 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. Credentials ID:PATH 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 , 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!. Other Examples Run an Arch Linux VM image generated by mkosi # mkosi -d arch -p systemd -p linux --autologin -o image.raw -f build # systemd-vmspawn --image=image.raw Exit status If an error occurred the value errno is propagated to the return code. Otherwise EXIT_SUCCESS is returned. See Also systemd1, mkosi1,