…and risky dependency. But for the VM and full OS container case there's no real need to use SSH via the network: these things run on the local system, hence why bother with IP? To address that we are adding a small generator (that means: a plugin for systemd that generates units on the fly, based on system state, configuration) which binds SSH to a local AF_VSOCK socket in a VM, and to an AF_UNIX socket in a container. You can then use these to directly connect to the system without involving…
the network. AF_VSOCK is an address family that is supported on many hypervisors (including kvm/qemu), that allows talking to VMs without bothering with a real network. It's modeled after IP but can be vastly simpler since there's no routing or anything. The aforementioned generator just binds ssh to AV_VSOCK port 22, via socket activation (this is hence more or less "free"), and only if sshd is actually installed. Moreover, if a container mgr mounts /run/host/unix-export/ into the container…