14 DAY TRIAL // Jan Kurik, Fedora Platform and Program Manager at Red Hat, has announced the first feature proposals for the upcoming Fedora 24 GNU/Linux operating system, for which the development cycle has already started.
One of these new feature proposals for Fedora 24 is the splitting of the main systemd package into two new subpackages, systemd-udev and systemd-container. As expected, this has caused a lot of controversy on the Fedora's devel-announce mailing list, but what you need to know is that both systemd subpackages will be optional.
While the systemd-container subpackage will include all the necessary tools useful for launching and managing containers and virtual machines, and it addresses Fedora Linux users who work with these kind of technologies, the systemd-udev subpackage will contain the udev daemon (udevd) and various hardware-related tools.
"Two new subpackages will be split out from the main systemd package. systemd container will contain stuff for launching and managing VMs and containers. system-udev will contain udevd and other hardware-related bits," is written in the new proposal, entitled "F24 System Wide Change: Systemd package split."
Here's what each systemd subpackage will include
It looks like that Fedora developers have already discussed which systemd tools will be included in the two new subpackages. Let's start with systemd-container.rpm, which promises to add systemd-pull, systemd-nspawn, machinectl, systemd-machined, and systemd-importd.
On the other hand, systemd-udev.rpm will consist of the hardware database, the udev rules, as well as the udevadm and systemd-udevd tools. To make this happen, Fedora devs will need to add all the necessary dependencies for the systemd-container and systemd-udev subpackages.
Also, the Anaconda installer needs to be updated to make sure the systemd-udev subpackage will be installed by default in Fedora 24. Anyway, it remains to be seen if this change will be implemented in the final release of the upcoming GNU/Linux operating system.