On 08.03.19 14:23, KatolaZ wrote:
> this is currently managed by eudev in devuan and, IIRC, it is simply
> regenerated as a random ID at each boot. I guess it's still there
> because it is used by several things, including
> session-management-related stuff. We had a discussion on IRC with Mark
> (LeePen) about that several weeks ago, and IIRC we concluded that
> keeping it around but re-generating it at boot was the way to avoid
> breakage.
>
> Any thoughts on the matter are appreciated, but concrete insight on
> the ins and outs are much more useful I guess (read: please let's
> avoid a useless uninformed flame about that :P).

I would assume that the machine-id is used for:
1. Software Licencing
2. Identifying machines in a pool/swarm/cluster/cloud of machines where
static IP adresses are not necessarily a given

similar to
HP/HP-UX: /bin/uname -i
IBM/AIX: /bin/uname -m
SGI/IRIX: /sbin/sysinfo -s
Sun/Solaris: /usr/ucb/hostid

machine-id should theoretical be a serial number or UUID

Cheers
  Mike