I'm not familiar with the term transactions, but it doesn't sound like it's the same as jobs. Jobs are externally visible. You can see them easily (e.g. system

I'm not familiar with the term transactions, but it doesn't sound like it's the same as jobs. Jobs are externally visible. You can see them easily (e.g. systemctl list-jobs), and systemd provides an interface for them over D-Bus[1]. There's no similar interface for anything called a transaction. From the documentation that does mention transactions, it sounds like transactions are internal to systemd. When systemd starts a unit, it works out the dependency graph and spins up a job for each unit that need to be started before the originally requested unit can start. That would all be considered a single transaction, but it might spin out into dozens of separate jobs that get queued up. As an example, when systemd starts on boot, all it really wants to do is successfully reach some target (e.g. multi-user.target). systemd starts from there and works backwards, building a dependency graph with every single unit that needs to start up as a part of the boot sequence to reach that target. You could probably consider that a single transaction, but the full dependency graph would probably pull in hundreds of jobs. I don't work on systemd or anything so this isn't canon. [1] https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/dbus/ https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/dbus/