systemd News Archives

Systemd had another busy year working on many new features from run0 as a sudo alternative to making systemd-homed more robust, increasing Varlink use, systemd-boot continuing to gain more traction, and more.

Coincidentally coming one day after the GNU Shepherd 1.0 service manager release, the systemd 257 release is now shipping as the newest feature release for this widely-used service manager / init system to Linux systems. Systemd 257 brings a number of new features and improvements for powering late 2024 and early 2025 Linux distributions.

Systemd 257 is nearing release as the next major feature release for this widely-used init system and software suite on Linux systems.

Released last week was systemd 257-rc1 while succeeding that already is systemd 257-rc2 and it comes with a new tool: systemd-keyutil.

Systemd 257-rc1 is out today as a big feature update for this release that brings many new features and other refinements to this key piece of the Linux operating system stack.

Open-source developer Zeeshan Ali Khan presented at last week's systemd "All Systems Go" developer conference on busd as a new D-Bus broker written in the Rust programming language.

Taking place this week in Berlin was systemd's annual "All Systems Go" developer conference. Among the interesting talks was Lennart Poettering talking about the ongoing challenges of D-Bus for inter-process communication (IPC) with systemd and how they are looking at Varlink for IPC needs moving forward.

In light of the CrowdStrike-Microsoft outage/disaster that has been wreaking havoc on corporate Windows systems around the world since Friday, systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering pointed out how such a situation on Linux systems could be averted by leveraging systemd's Automatic Boot Assessment functionality.

For those running the command "systemd-tmpfiles --purge" and think that this command just deletes your temporary files, think again and watch out. In reality it will delete all files and directories created by a tmpfiles.d entry... Including the /home that is created by systemd-tmpfiles' home.conf. With users being bitten in recent days by this behavior when they were just expecting tmp files to be removed, systemd 256.1 is now available and does have a change to avoid inadvertently deleting your all-important home directory.

Systemd 256 is out today as the latest major feature update to this integral component to modern Linux distributions.

It looks like systemd 256 will officially debut as stable in the near future with systemd 256-rc3 being released today and not tacking on any new features compared to the prior release candidates.

The first release candidate of systemd 256 came just under one month ago with new features like run0 as the new sudo alternative, a new "systemd-vpick" binary, importctl as another new tool, Zboot kernel support with systemd ukify, systemd-homed improvements, and much more. Systemd 256-rc2 is out this evening with a few more features and other fixes collected over the past several weeks.

Overnight systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering wrote on Mastodon around systemd's newest effort: run0 as a sudo-like command.

Systemd 256-rc1 is available this evening and it comes with many new features and improvements to existing features. It's a big one.

As part of our various year-end articles, here is a look back at the most popular systemd stories on Phoronix for the past year.

Ahead of the holidays systemd 255 has debuted as stable and comes with systemd-bsod as a "Blue Screen of Death" service capable of displaying full-screen error messages on Linux. There's also a new tool, systemd-vmspawn, that can be used for spawning virtual machines.

Systemd 255-rc1 is out this morning and it's packed with even more features for this dominant Linux init system and a growing list of other system utilities. Systemd 255 even is introducing systemd-bsod as a "Blue Screen of Death" for displaying important error messages during boot failure, systemd-vmspawn as a new tool to spawn virtual machines, and other new features.

Lennart Poettering has been working on a new systemd feature called systemd-storagetm that is inspired by the Apple macOS "Target Disk Mode" feature.

After a hiatus due to the pandemic, systemd's All Systems Go conference is returning next week to Berlin.

Systemd 254 is out today in time for appearing in the late-2023 Linux distribution releases.

Earlier this month brought the release of systemd 254-rc1 with a new soft-reboot mechanism, officially deprecating System V scripts, a new systemd-battery-check process that runs at boot to check any system battery level status, and various other changes. On Friday systemd 254-rc2 was released with a few more changes.

Out today is the first release candidate of systemd 254. This systemd update is another big feature release with new settings, new components, and many additions to existing systemd components. Plus there is some deprecations and breakage ahead for future releases.

After going through several release candidates the past few weeks, systemd 253 has officially shipped today as the newest version of this init system and service manager for Linux systems.

Systemd 253 is gearing up for release while out today is the third and possibly final release candidate.

Following last month's release of systemd 253-rc1 with many new features and changes in tow, out today is a second release candidate and is piling yet more features into this Linux system and service manager.

Systemd developers today released their first release candidate of the upcoming systemd 253 feature release, which introduces a new "ukify" tool and has many other changes for this dominant Linux init system.

With the end of the year upon us, it's interesting and fun running GitStats on various prominent open-source projects and looking at some of the key growth metrics over the past year. Here is a look at how systemd's Git activity has paced in 2022 compared to years prior.

Systemd developers are celebrating Halloween by releasing systemd 252.

Systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering has written a lengthy blog post entitled a "brave new trusted boot world" in which he outlines current issues with the Linux boot process and how there is a trajectory for providing the Linux boot experience with more robustness, simplicity, and trust.

Two weeks ago was the release of systemd 252-rc1 with introducing the new systemd-measure command, a "support-ended" taint flag for OS images detected past their end-of-support date, and a wide variety of other changes and feature additions. Systemd 252-rc2 is now available for additional testing with various fixes plus a few more additions.

Systemd 252-rc1 is out as the first test candidate ahead of this next big feature release for this dominant Linux init systemd. Systemd 252 has been working on a new "systemd-measure" tool and a wide variety of other changes.

Microsoft and Canonical jointly announced today that systemd now works within Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2).

Red Hat engineer and systemd developer Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek presented on Monday at the Linux Plumbers Conference on a new design for inital RAM disks (initrd) making use of the new systemd mkosi-initrd project.

Stemming from Ubuntu 22.04 LTS activating systemd's out-of-memory daemon (systemd-oomd) and users finding their web browser being killed when facing memory or swap pressure, a change has been upstreamed in systemd to help alleviate this situation.

To much surprise, the lead developer of systemd Lennart Poettering who also led the creation of PulseAudio, Avahi, and has been a prolific free software contributor has reportedly left Red Hat.

Systemd 251 is officially out this Saturday as the first feature update to this Linux init system for 2022.

Released on Friday was systemd 251-rc3 as what should be the last planned release candidate for this first major feature update since last December.

Just over one month after systemd 251-rc1 was released, a second release candidate to this next systemd installment is now available for testing. Systemd 251-rc2 brings yet more features to this Linux init system and service manager.

Systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering is out with his first blog post since last September. Today he's relaying the power of the systemd-sysext component shipped as part of systemd for loading/merging "system extension" images on the system for manipulating the exposed /usr.

The first release candidate of systemd 251 is now available for testing as a rather large update to this Linux init system and service manager.

With the continuously growing set of features and functionality provided by systemd, this year saw the project hitting record growth in terms of commit activity that easily surpassed prior years. Surprisingly, Lennart Poettering dropped from his spot as the one responsible for the most commits each year.

Systemd 250 is the latest major open-source software project release for those trying to get out their releases before year's end... Simply put, systemd 250 is a very big feature release.

It was just over one week ago the systemd 250 release candidate was issued (along with a brown paper bag 250-rc2 fix-up release). Systemd 250 has a ton of changes for this init system and more while today systemd 250-rc3 was released with yet more changes in tow.

Systemd 250 is gearing up for release this month and today marked the availability of the first release candidate (and RC2 as a brown paper bag update). Systemd 250 is packing a rather large number of new features and changes across the board for this dominant Linux init system and service manager.

Most Linux distributions are currently coming up short from offering adequate security around full disk encryption and authenticated boot. Prominent Linux developer Lennart Poettering even argues that your data is "probably more secure if stored on current ChromeOS, Android, Windows or macOS devices."

Systemd-oomd as the out-of-memory daemon originally developed by Facebook has been maturing nicely since being merged last year and then its most notable deployment to date has been with Fedora 34's debut earlier this year. Anita Zhang of Facebook provided an update today on the systemd-oomd effort.

Systemd 249 has been promoted to stable as the newest version of this Linux init system.

Another release candidate of systemd 249 is available for testing while the actual release appears imminent.

Microsoft and systemd developers are proposing a global counter for block device changes for the Linux kernel to better track changes and having a unique system-wide number for disk and other block device changes rather than on a per-disk basis.

Earlier this month systemd 249-rc1 arrived with a variety of new features and improvements. Now for closing out the month is a second release candidate.