--cpus=number

Number of CPUs. Only supported for QEMU machines.

--disk-size=number

Size of the disk for the guest VM in GB. Can only be increased. Only supported for QEMU machines.

--help

Print usage statement.

--memory, -m=number

Memory (in MB). Only supported for QEMU machines.

--rootful

Whether this machine prefers rootful (true) or rootless (false) container execution. This option updates the current podman remote connection default if it is currently pointing at the specified machine name (or podman-machine-default if no name is specified).

Unlike [podman system connection default] this option makes the API socket, if available, forward to the rootful/rootless socket in the VM.

Note that changing this option means that all the existing containers/images/volumes, etc... are no longer visible with the default connection/socket. This is because the root and rootless users in the VM are completely separated and do not share any storage. The data however is not lost and you can always change this option back or use the other connection to access it.

--usb=bus=number,devnum=number or vendor=hexadecimal,product=hexadecimal or ""

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

The device needs to be present when the VM starts. The device needs to have proper permissions in order to be assign to podman machine.

Use an empty string to remove all previously set USB devices.

Note that using bus and device number are simpler but the values can change every boot or when the device is unplugged. Using vendor and product might lead to collision in the case of multiple devices with the same vendor product value, the first available device is assigned.

--user-mode-networking

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.