In my previous post on systemd-nspawn I mentioned, I was unclear on how to persist resource control options for a container. Today I accidentally discovered how can the property be persisted across boot without modifying service file or writing custom service file for container. It is done using systemctl set-property
To set CPUAccounting and CPUShares for a container we need to run following command.
systemctl set-property systemd-nspawn@container.service CPUACCounting=1 CPUShares=200
This actually persists these settings at location, /etc/systemd/systemd-nspawn@container.service.d/ folder. So in our case there will be 2 files created under above location by name 50-CPUAccounting.conf and 50-CPUShares.conf with following contents.
# 50-CPUAccounting.conf
[Service]
CPUAccounting=yes
# 50-CPUShares.conf
[Service]
CPUShares=200
Today when I discovered this folder and saw the file contents, I became curious and started to wonder who created this folder. The look at systemctl man page made showed me this.
- set-property NAME ASSIGNMENT...
Set the specified unit properties at runtime where this is supported. This allows changing configuration parameter properties such as resource control settings at runtime. Not all properties may be changed at runtime, but many resource control settings (primarily those in systemd.resource-control(5)) may. The changes are applied instantly, and stored on disk for future boots, unless --runtime is passed, in which case the settings only apply until the next reboot. The syntax of the property assignment follows closely the syntax of assignments in unit files.
Example: systemctl set-property foobar.service CPUShares=777
Note that this command allows changing multiple properties at the same time, which is preferable over setting them individually. Like unit file configuration settings, assigning the empty list to list parameters will reset the list.
I did remember doing this for my container and hence it became clear these files are actually written by systemctl set-property.
In case you don't want to persist the properties across boot you can simply pass --runtime switch.
Basically this is not just for container, resource control can be thus applied to any running service on the system. This is actually cool.