podman-machine-init - Man Page

Number of CPUs.

Size of the disk for the guest VM in GiB.

Print usage statement.

Fully qualified path of the ignition file.

If an ignition file is provided, the file is copied into the user's CONF_DIR and renamed.  Additionally, no SSH keys are generated, nor are any system connections made.  It is assumed that the user does these things manually or handled otherwise.

Fully qualified registry, path, or URL to a VM image. Registry target must be in the form of docker://registry/repo/image:version.

Memory (in MiB). Note: 1024MiB = 1GiB.

Start the virtual machine immediately after it has been initialized.

Whether this machine prefers rootful (true) or rootless (false) container execution. This option determines the remote connection default if there is no existing remote connection configurations.

API forwarding, if available, follows this setting.

Set the timezone for the machine and containers.  Valid values are local or a timezone such as America/Chicago.  A value of local, which is the default, means to use the timezone of the machine host.

The timezone setting is not used with WSL.  WSL automatically sets the timezone to the same as the host Windows operating system.

Assign a USB device from the host to the VM via USB passthrough. Only supported for QEMU Machines.

The device needs to have proper permissions in order to be passed to the machine. This means the device needs to be under your user group.

Note that using bus and device number are simpler but the values can change every boot or when the device is unplugged.

When specifying a USB using vendor and product ID's, if more than one device has the same vendor and product ID, the first available device is assigned.

Indicates that this machine relays traffic from the guest through a user-space process running on the host. In some VPN configurations the VPN may drop traffic from alternate network interfaces, including VM network devices. By enabling user-mode networking (a setting of true), VPNs observe all podman machine traffic as coming from the host, bypassing the problem.

When the qemu backend is used (Linux, Mac), user-mode networking is mandatory and the only allowed value is true. In contrast, The Windows/WSL backend defaults to false, and follows the standard WSL network setup. Changing this setting to true on Windows/WSL informs Podman to replace the WSL networking setup on start of this machine instance with a user-mode networking distribution. Since WSL shares the same kernel across distributions, all other running distributions reuses this network. Likewise, when the last machine instance with a true setting stops, the original networking setup is restored.

Username to use for executing commands in remote VM. Default value is core for FCOS and user for Fedora (default on Windows hosts). Should match the one used inside the resulting VM image.

Mounts a volume from source to target.

Create a mount. If /host-dir:/machine-dir is specified as the *source:target*, Podman mounts host-dir in the host to machine-dir in the Podman machine.

Additional options may be specified as a comma-separated string. Recognized options are: * ro: mount volume read-only * rw: mount volume read/write (default) * security_model=[model]: specify 9p security model (see below)

The 9p security model [determines] https://wiki.qemu.org/Documentation/9psetup#Starting_the_Guest_directly if and how the 9p filesystem translates some filesystem operations before actual storage on the host.

In order to allow symlinks to work, on MacOS the default security model is
none.

The value of mapped-xattr specifies that 9p store symlinks and some file attributes as extended attributes on the host. This is suitable when the host and the guest do not need to interoperate on the shared filesystem, but has caveats for actual shared access; notably, symlinks on the host are not usable on the guest and vice versa. If interoperability is required, then choose none instead, but keep in mind that the guest is not able to do things that the user running the virtual machine cannot do, e.g. create files owned by another user. Using none is almost certainly the best choice for read-only volumes.

Example: -v "$HOME/git:$HOME/git:ro,security_model=none"

Default volume mounts are defined in containers.conf.  Unless changed, the default values is $HOME:$HOME.

Note on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) Since all drives are mounted at /mnt on startup by default in WSL, passing --volume is redundant and has no effect. The host home directory for a C: drive will be mounted at /mnt/c/Users/<my username>.