The latest version of systemd can be downloaded from Softpedia

Mar 26, 2014 10:16 GMT  ·  By

systemd 212, a system and service manager for Linux, compatible with SysV and LSB init scripts, which provides aggressive parallelization capabilities and uses socket and D-Bus activation for starting services, has been released and is now available for download.

The 209 version still sends ripples through the development cycle and stuff that has been implemented in that huge update is still being worked on and improved.

The systemd developers had their hands full after that update and even recommended that Linux distributions not integrate it. Then, the 211 release of systemd arrived, fixing tons of problems. Things seem to simmer down with the current version, 212, and this looks like a good time to adopt it in your operating system.

This update is much smaller than the previous one, but it has some interesting changes. One of the most important is related to the brightness setting, which has been a point of contention for some time.

"When restoring the screen brightness at boot, stay away from the darkest setting or from the lowest 5% of the available range, depending on which is the larger value of both. This should effectively protect the user from rebooting into a black screen, should the brightness have been set to minimum by accident," notes Kay Sievers in the announcement.

Other changes are not so big, but they should be mentioned nonetheless. For example, a new sd_machine_get_class() call has been added to sd-login in order to determine the class ("vm" or "container") of a machine registered with machined, PID 1 will now maintain a system-wide system state engine with the states "starting," "running," "degraded," "maintenance," "stopping," and a new command "list-machines" has been added to "systemctl" that lists all local OS containers.

Also, a new "-r" switch has been added to systemctl in order to recursively enumerate units on all local containers, the GPT automatic partition discovery logic will now honor two GPT partition flags, two new GPT type UUIDs have been added for automatic root partition discovery (for 32-bit and 64-bit ARM), and logind will now automatically remove all IPC objects owned by a user if she or he fully logs out.

On a different note, Debian has just adopted the use of systemd for its distribution and decided to give up on upstart. It's likely that more patches will now be pushed for system, given the size of the Debian community.

A detailed changelog of the new release is available in the mailing list. Download systemd 212 right now from Softpedia.