Well, yes and no. Systemd starts the k3s master process (or whatever it is called). It also stops this process. At this point, Systemd’s work is done and it is

Well, yes and no. Systemd starts the k3s master process (or whatever it is called). It also stops this process. At this point, Systemd’s work is done and it is working properly. Now k3s of course starts tons of stuff, mostly in containers. Therein lies the problem: By default, Systemd indeed tries to get rid of the entire process tree. It does this using control groups (cgroups). Unfortunately, it is easy for a process to “escape” its control group, at least for root. Stopping the master process could absolutely be made to also stop everything. It would be great if k3s did properly integrate with Systemd. It doesn’t, but Systemd is not to blame for that. That’s my point.