I spent some time today looking at systemd (44) under Fedora (17). When stopping an LXC container using lxc-stop, I would always encounter this problem:

# lxc-stop -n node0
lxc-start: Device or resource busy - failed to remove cgroup '/sys/fs/cgroup/systemd/node0

This prevents one from starting a new container with the same name:

# lxc-start -n node0 
lxc-start: Device or resource busy - failed to remove previous cgroup '/sys/fs/cgroup/systemd/node0'
lxc-start: failed to spawn 'node0'
lxc-start: Device or resource busy - failed to remove cgroup '/sys/fs/cgroup/systemd/node0'

You can correct the problem manually by removing all the child cgroups underneath /sys/fs/cgroup/systemd/<container>, like this:

# find /sys/fs/cgroup/systemd/node0/ -type d |
  tac |
  xargs rmdir

The call to tac (which will output lines in reverse order) is necessary because we need to start with the “deepest” directory and work our way back up.

This appears to be a version-specific problem. I do not see the same behavior with systemd 197 under Arch.