May 11th, 2013· The Python bindings gained some minimal support for the APIs exposed by libsystemd-logind.
· ConditionSecurity= gained support for detecting SMACK. Since this condition already supports SELinux and AppArmor we only miss IMA for this. Patches welcome!
May 7th, 2013· systemd-nspawn will now create /etc/resolv.conf if necessary, before bind-mounting the host's file onto it.
· systemd-nspawn will now store meta information about a container on the container's cgroup as extended attribute fields, including the root directory.
· The cgroup hierarchy has been reworked in many ways. All objects any of the components systemd creates in the cgroup tree are now suffixed. More specifically, user sessions are now placed in cgroups suffixed with ".session", users in cgroups suffixed with ".user", and nspawn containers in cgroups suffixed with ".nspawn". Furthermore, all cgroup names are now escaped in a simple scheme to avoid collision of userspace object names with kernel filenames. This work is preparation for making these objects relocatable in the cgroup tree, in order to allow easy resource partitioning of these objects without causing naming conflicts.
· systemctl list-dependencies gained the new switches --plain, --reverse, --after and --before.
· systemd-inhibit now shows the process name of processes that have taken an inhibitor lock.
· nss-myhostname will now also resolve "localhost" implicitly. This makes /etc/hosts an optional file and nicely handles that on IPv6 ::1 maps to both "localhost" and the local hostname.
· libsystemd-logind.so gained a new call sd_get_machine_names() to enumerate running containers and VMs (currently only supported by very new libvirt and nspawn). sd_login_monitor can now be used to watch VMs/containers coming and going.
· .include is not allowed recursively anymore, and only in unit files. Usually it is better to use drop-in snippets in .d/*.conf anyway, as introduced with systemd 198.
· systemd-analyze gained a new "critical-chain" command that determines the slowest chain of units run during system boot-up. It is very useful for tracking down where optimizing boot time is the most beneficial.
· systemd will no longer allow manipulating service paths in the name=systemd:/system cgroup tree using ControlGroup= in units. (But is still fine with it in all other dirs.)
· There's a new systemd-nspawn at .service service file that may be used to easily run nspawn containers as system services. With the container's root directory in /var/lib/container/foobar it is now sufficient to run "systemctl start systemd-nspawn at foobar.service" to boot it.
· systemd-cgls gained a new parameter "--machine" to list only the processes within a certain container.
· ConditionSecurity= now can check for "apparmor". We still are lacking checks for SMACK and IMA for this condition check though. Patches welcome!
· A new configuration file /etc/systemd/sleep.conf has been added that may be used to configure which kernel operation systemd is supposed to execute when "suspend", "hibernate" or "hybrid-sleep" is requested. This makes the new kernel "freeze" state accessible to the user.
· ENV{SYSTEMD_WANTS} in udev rules will now implicitly escape the passed argument if applicable.
April 9th, 2013· journalctl --update-catalog now understands a new --root= option to operate on catalogs found in a different root directory.
· During shutdown after systemd has terminated all running services a final killing loop kills all remaining left-over processes. We will now print the name of these processes when we send SIGKILL to them, since this usually indicates a problem.
· If /etc/crypttab refers to password files stored on configured mount points automatic dependencies will now be generated to ensure the specific mount is established first before the key file is attempted to be read.
· 'systemctl status' will now show information about the network sockets a socket unit is listening on.
· 'systemctl status' will also shown information about any drop-in configuration file for units. (Drop-In configuration files in this context are files such as /etc/systemd/systemd/foobar.service.d/*.conf)
· systemd-cgtop now optionally shows summed up CPU times of cgroups. Press '%' while running cgtop to switch between percentage and absolute mode. This is useful to determine which cgroups use up the most CPU time over the entire runtime of the system. systemd-cgtop has also been updated to be 'pipeable' for processing with further shell tools.
· 'hostnamectl set-hostname' will now allow setting of FQDN hostnames.
· The formatting and parsing of time span values has been changed. The parser now understands fractional expressions such as "5.5h". The formatter will now output fractional expressions for all time spans under 1min, i.e. "5.123456s" rather than "5s 123ms 456us". For time spans under 1s millisecond values are shown, for those under 1ms microsecond values are shown. This should greatly improve all time-related output of systemd.
· libsystemd-login and libsystemd-journal gained new functions for querying the poll() events mask and poll() timeout value for integration into arbitrary event loops.
· localectl gained the ability to list available X11 keymaps (models, layouts, variants, options).
· 'systemd-analyze dot' gained the ability to filter for specific units via shell-style globs, to create smaller, more useful graphs. I.e. it's now possible to create simple graphs of all the dependencies between only target units, or of all units that Avahi has dependencies with.
January 8th, 2013· Timer units now support calendar time events in addition to monotonic time events. That means you can now trigger a unit based on a calendar time specification such as "Thu,Fri 2013-*-1,5 11:12:13" which refers to 11:12:13 of the first or fifth day of any month of the year 2013, given that it is a thursday or friday. This brings timer event support considerably closer to cron's capabilities. For details on the supported calendar time specification language see systemd.time(7).
udev now supports a number of different naming policies for network interfaces for predictable names, and a combination of these policies is now the default. Please see this wiki document for details:
· http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/PredictableNetworkInterfaceNames
· Auke Kok's bootchart implementation has been added to the systemd tree. It's an optional component that can graph the boot in quite some detail. It's one of the best bootchart implementations around and minimal in its code and dependencies.
· nss-myhostname has been integrated into the systemd source tree. nss-myhostname guarantees that the local hostname always stays resolvable via NSS. It has been a weak requirement of systemd-hostnamed since a long time, and since its code is actually trivial we decided to just include it in systemd's source tree. It can be turned off with a configure switch.
· The read-ahead logic is now capable of properly detecting whether a btrfs file system is on SSD or rotating media, in order to optimize the read-ahead scheme. Previously, it was only capable of detecting this on traditional file systems such as ext4.
· In udev, additional device properties are now read from the IAB in addition to the OUI database. Also, Bluetooth company identities are attached to the devices as well.
· In service files %U may be used as specifier that is replaced by the configured user name of the service.
· nspawn may now be invoked without a controlling TTY. This makes it suitable for invocation as its own service. This may be used to set up a simple containerized server system using only core OS tools.
· systemd and nspawn can now accept socket file descriptors when they are started for socket activation. This enables implementation of socket activated nspawn containers. i.e. think about autospawning an entire OS image when the first SSH or HTTP connection is received. We expect that similar functionality will also be added to libvirt-lxc eventually.
· journalctl will now suppress ANSI color codes when presenting log data.systemctl will no longer show control group information for a unit if a the control group is empty anyway.
· logind can now automatically suspend/hibernate/shutdown the system on idle.
· /etc/machine-info and hostnamed now also expose the chassis type of the system. This can be used to determine whether the local system is a laptop, desktop, handset or tablet. This information may either be configured by the user/vendor or is automatically determined from ACPI and DMI information if possible.
· A number of PolicyKit actions are now bound together with "imply" rules. This should simplify creating UIs because many actions will now authenticate similar ones as well.
· Unit files learnt a new condition ConditionACPower= which may be used to conditionalize a unit depending on whether an AC power source is connected or not, of whether the system is running on battery power.
· systemctl gained a new "is-failed" verb that may be used in shell scripts and suchlike to check whether a specific unit is in the "failed" state.
· The EnvironmentFile= setting in unit files now supports file globbing, and can hence be used to easily read a number of environment files at once.
· systemd will no longer detect and recognize specific distributions. All distribution-specific #ifdeffery has been removed, systemd is now fully generic and distribution-agnostic. Effectively, not too much is lost as a lot of the code is still accessible via explicit configure switches. However, support for some distribution specific legacy configuration file formats has been dropped. We recommend distributions to simply adopt the configuration files everybody else uses now and convert the old configuration from packaging scripts. Most distributions already did that. If that's not possible or desirable, distributions are welcome to forward port the specific pieces of code locally from the git history.
· When logging a message about a unit systemd will now always log the unit name in the message meta data.
· localectl will now also discover system locale data that is not stored in locale archives, but directly unpacked.
· logind will no longer unconditionally use framebuffer devices as seat masters, i.e. as devices that are required to be existing before a seat is considered preset. Instead, it will now look for all devices that are tagged as "seat-master" in udev. By default framebuffer devices will be marked as such, but depending on local systems other devices might be marked as well. This may be used to integrate graphics cards using closed source drivers (such as NVidia ones) more nicely into logind. Note however, that we recommend using the open source NVidia drivers instead, and no udev rules for the closed-source drivers will be shipped from us upstream.
October 4th, 2012· An empty or non-existent /etc/vconsole.conf now causes the retention of the kernel state instead of loading systemd-specified defaults.
September 29th, 2012· An (optional) journal gateway daemon is now available as "systemd-journal-gatewayd.service". This service provides access to the journal via HTTP and JSON.
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