Slim down systemd for LXC container

I’m not a fan of Docker container and the microservice approach. Application containers limit me too much - especially only one process to be started. In contrast, I have too many unnecessary processes active in the system-container LXC with systemd. Unfortunately, more and more Debian packages require systemd.

Can we slim down systemd for LXC container so that only systemctl service start / stop works and the other (useless for a container) components are deactivated? Deactivation of the network manager is a known tweak. And the rest?

Hi!

This is a container image question, which means that you should be able to achieve what you need by creating a minimal container image. The tool that builds the container images found at the ubuntu: and images: repositories is distrobuilder, https://github.com/lxc/distrobuilder The configuration files for each container image can be found at https://github.com/lxc/lxc-ci/tree/master/images

I do not know the exact changes you have in mind. I suggest to give it a try and produce such a minimal container image for Debian so that it is possible to evaluate the benefits of the simplifications.

1 Like

Hi, I am curious if you got this to work?

I’d like to have arch flavored systemd inside arch, many times, so this topic is quite interesting to me.

Basically syststemd inside lxc.

Cheers!