systemd-nspawn has been called “chroot on steroids”, but if you think of it as Docker with a slightly different target you wouldn’t be far wrong, either. It can be used to spawn containers on your host, and has a variety of options for configuring the containerized environment through the use of private networking, bind mounts, capability controls, and a variety of other facilities that give you flexible container management.

There are many different ways in which it can be used. I’m going to focus on one that’s a bit of a corner use case that I find particularly interesting. In this article we’re going to explore how we can use systemd-nspawn to spawn lightweight containers for architectures other than that of our host system.