[arch-dev-public] FYI: systemd 198

[Tom Gundersen]

Hi guys,

A new systemd release is out (not yet packaged though), and there are
several features which might be of interest to us.

Cheers,

Tom

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Lennart Poettering <lennart at poettering.net>
Date: Fri, Mar 8, 2013 at 8:12 AM
Subject: [systemd-devel] [ANNOUNCE] systemd 198
To: systemd Mailing List <systemd-devel at lists.freedesktop.org>


Hey!

Finally, here's 198, with many big changes:

http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/systemd-198.tar.xz

In detail:

        * Configuration of unit files may now be extended via drop-in
          files without having to edit/override the unit files
          themselves. More specifically, if the administrator wants to
          change one value for a service file foobar.service he can
          now do so by dropping in a configuration snippet into
          /etc/systemd/systemd/foobar.service.d/*.conf. The unit logic
          will load all these snippets and apply them on top of the
          main unit configuration file, possibly extending or
          overriding its settings. Using these drop-in snippets is
          generally nicer than the two earlier options for changing
          unit files locally: copying the files from
          /usr/lib/systemd/system/ to /etc/systemd/system/ and editing
          them there; or creating a new file in /etc/systemd/system/
          that incorporates the original one via ".include". Drop-in
          snippets into these .d/ directories can be placed in any
          directory systemd looks for units in, and the usual
          overriding semantics between /usr/lib, /etc and /run apply
          for them too.

        * Most unit file settings which take lists of items can now be
          reset by assigning the empty string to them. For example,
          normally, settings such as Environment=FOO=BAR append a new
          environment variable assignment to the environment block,
          each time they are used. By assigning Environment= the empty
          string the environment block can be reset to empty. This is
          particularly useful with the .d/*.conf drop-in snippets
          mentioned above, since this adds the ability to reset list
          settings from vendor unit files via these drop-ins.

        * systemctl gained a new "list-dependencies" command for
          listing the dependencies of a unit recursively.

        * Inhibitors are now honored and listed by "systemctl
          suspend", "systemctl poweroff" (and similar) too, not only
          GNOME. These commands will also list active sessions by
          other users.

        * Resource limits (as exposed by the various control group
          controllers) can now be controlled dynamically at runtime
          for all units. More specifically, you can now use a command
          like "systemctl set-cgroup-attr foobar.service cpu.shares
          2000" to alter the CPU shares a specific service gets. These
          settings are stored persistently on disk, and thus allow the
          administrator to easily adjust the resource usage of
          services with a few simple commands. This dynamic resource
          management logic is also available to other programs via the
          bus. Almost any kernel cgroup attribute and controller is
          supported.

        * systemd-vconsole-setup will now copy all font settings to
          all allocated VTs, where it previously applied them only to
          the foreground VT.

        * libsystemd-login gained the new sd_session_get_tty() API
          call.

        * This release drops support for a few legacy or
          distribution-specific LSB facility names when parsing init
          scripts: $x-display-manager, $mail-transfer-agent,
          $mail-transport-agent, $mail-transfer-agent, $smtp,
          $null. Also, the mail-transfer-agent.target unit backing
          this has been removed. Distributions which want to retain
          compatibility with this should carry the burden for
          supporting this themselves and patch support for these back
          in, if they really need to. Also, the facilities $syslog and
          $local_fs are now ignored, since systemd does not support
          early-boot LSB init scripts anymore, and these facilities
          are implied anyway for normal services. syslog.target has
          also been removed.

        * There are new bus calls on PID1's Manager object for
          cancelling jobs, and removing snapshot units. Previously,
          both calls were only available on the Job and Snapshot
          objects themselves.

        * systemd-journal-gatewayd gained SSL support.

        * The various "environment" files, such as /etc/locale.conf
          now support continuation lines with a backslash ("\") as
          last character in the line, similar in style (but different)
          to how this is supported in shells.

        * For normal user processes the _SYSTEMD_USER_UNIT= field is
          now implicitly appended to every log entry logged. systemctl
          has been updated to filter by this field when operating on a
          user systemd instance.

        * nspawn will now implicitly add the CAP_AUDIT_WRITE and
          CAP_AUDIT_CONTROL capabilities to the capabilities set for
          the container. This makes it easier to boot unmodified
          Fedora systems in a container, which however still requires
          audit=0 to be passed on the kernel command line. Auditing in
          kernel and userspace is unfortunately still too broken in
          context of containers, hence we recommend compiling it out
          of the kernel or using audit=0. Hopefully this will be fixed
          one day for good in the kernel.

        * nspawn gained the new --bind= and --bind-ro= parameters to
          bind mount specific directories from the host into the
          container.

        * nspawn will now mount its own devpts file system instance
          into the container, in order not to leak pty devices from
          the host into the container.

        * systemd will now read the firmware boot time performance
          information from the EFI variables, if the used boot loader
          supports this, and takes it into account for boot performance
          analysis via "systemd-analyze". This is currently supported
          only in conjunction with Gummiboot, but could be supported
          by other boot loaders too. For details see:

          http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/BootLoaderInterface

        * A new generator has been added that automatically mounts the
          EFI System Partition (ESP) to /boot, if that directory
          exists, is empty, and no other file system has been
          configured to be mounted there.

        * logind will now send out PrepareForSleep(false) out
          unconditionally, after coming back from suspend. This may be
          used by applications as asynchronous notification for
          system resume events.

        * "systemctl unlock-sessions" has been added, that allows
          unlocking the screens of all user sessions at once, similar
          how "systemctl lock-sessions" already locked all users
          sessions. This is backed by a new D-Bus call UnlockSessions().

        * "loginctl seat-status" will now show the master device of a
          seat. (i.e. the device of a seat that needs to be around for
          the seat to be considered available, usually the graphics
          card).

        * tmpfiles gained a new "X" line type, that allows
          configuration of files and directories (with wildcards) that
          shall be excluded from automatic cleanup ("aging").

        * udev default rules set the device node permissions now only
          at "add" events, and do not change them any longer with a
          later "change" event.

        * The log messages for lid events and power/sleep keypresses
          now carry a message ID.

        * We now have a substantially larger unit test suite, but this
          continues to be work in progress.

        * udevadm hwdb gained a new --root= parameter to change the
          root directory to operate relative to.

        * logind will now issue a background sync() request to the kernel
          early at shutdown, so that dirty buffers are flushed to disk early
          instead of at the last moment, in order to optimize shutdown
          times a little.

        * A new bootctl tool has been added that is an interface for
          certain boot loader operations. This is currently a preview
          and is likely to be extended into a small mechanism daemon
          like timedated, localed, hostnamed, and can be used by
          graphical UIs to enumerate available boot options, and
          request boot into firmware operations.

        * systemd-bootchart has been relicensed to LGPLv2.1+ to match
          the rest of the package. It also has been updated to work
          correctly in initrds.

        * Policykit previously has been runtime optional, and is now
          also compile time optional via a configure switch.

        * systemd-analyze has been reimplemented in C. Also "systemctl
          dot" has moved into systemd-analyze.

        * "systemctl status" with no further parameters will now print
          the status of all active or failed units.

        * Operations such as "systemctl start" can now be executed
          with a new mode "--irreversible" which may be used to queue
          operations that cannot accidentally be reversed by a later
          job queuing. This is by default used to make shutdown
          requests more robust.

        * The Python API of systemd now gained a new module for
          reading journal files.

        * A new tool kernel-install has been added that can install
          kernel images according to the Boot Loader Specification:

          http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/BootLoaderSpec

        * Boot time console output has been improved to provide
          animated boot time output for hanging jobs.

        * A new tool systemd-activate has been added which can be used
          to test socket activation with, directly from the command
          line. This should make it much easier to test and debug
          socket activation in daemons.

        * journalctl gained a new "--reverse" (or -r) option to show
          journal output in reverse order (i.e. newest line first).

        * journalctl gained a new "--pager-end" (or -e) option to jump
          to immediately jump to the end of the journal in the
          pager. This is only supported in conjunction with "less".

        * journalctl gained a new "--user-unit=" option, that works
          similar to "--unit=" but filters for user units rather than
          system units.

        * A number of unit files to ease adoption of systemd in
          initrds has been added. This moves some minimal logic from
          the various initrd implementations into systemd proper.

        * The journal files are now owned by a new group
          "systemd-journal", which exists specifically to allow access
          to the journal, and nothing else. Previously, we used the
          "adm" group for that, which however possibly covers more
          than just journal/log file access. This new group is now
          already used by systemd-journal-gatewayd to ensure this
          daemon gets access to the journal files and as little else
          as possible. Note that "make install" will also set FS ACLs
          up for /var/log/journal to give "adm" and "wheel" read
          access to it, in addition to "systemd-journal" which owns
          the journal files. We recommend that packaging scripts also
          add read access to "adm" + "wheel" to /var/log/journal, and
          all existing/future journal files. To normal users and
          administrators little changes, however packagers need to
          ensure to create the "systemd-journal" system group at
          package installation time.

        * The systemd-journal-gatewayd now runs as unprivileged user
          systemd-journal-gateway:systemd-journal-gateway. Packaging
          scripts need to create these system user/group at
          installation time.

        * timedated now exposes a new boolean property CanNTP that
          indicates whether a local NTP service is available or not.

        * systemd-detect-virt will now also detect xen PVs

        * The pstore file system is now mounted by default, if it is
          available.

        * In addition to the SELinux and IMA policies we will now also
          load SMACK policies at early boot.

        Contributions from: Adel Gadllah, Aleksander Morgado, Auke
        Kok, Ayan George, Bastien Nocera, Colin Walters, Daniel Buch,
        Daniel Wallace, Dave Reisner, David Herrmann, David Strauss,
        Eelco Dolstra, Enrico Scholz, Frederic Crozat, Harald Hoyer,
        Jan Janssen, Jonathan Callen, Kay Sievers, Lennart Poettering,
        Lukas Nykryn, Mantas Mikulėnas, Marc-Antoine Perennou, Martin
        Pitt, Mauro Dreissig, Max F. Albrecht, Michael Biebl, Michael
        Olbrich, Michal Schmidt, Michal Sekletar, Michal Vyskocil,
        Michał Bartoszkiewicz, Mirco Tischler, Nathaniel Chen, Nestor
        Ovroy, Oleksii Shevchuk, Paul W. Frields, Piotr Drąg, Rob
        Clark, Ryan Lortie, Simon McVittie, Simon Peeters, Steven
        Hiscocks, Thomas Hindoe Paaboel Andersen, Tollef Fog Heen, Tom
        Gundersen, Umut Tezduyar, William Giokas, Zbigniew
        Jędrzejewski-Szmek, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)

Lennart

--
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.
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