14 DAY TRIAL // systemd, a 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 just reached version 213 and comes with a lot of changes and improvements.
Some of the previous systemd versions were very large and made the entire package a little unstable. The developers have since then fixed most of problems and they are no longer recommending to use an older and more stable version.
systemd has seen many updates in 2014 and it doesn't look like the devs are slowing down. If anything, the number of releases will likely begin to increase once the Debian and Ubuntu developers start sending patches upstream for various issues.
“A new ‘systemd-timesyncd’ daemon has been added for synchronizing the system clock across the network. It implements an SNTP client. In contrast to NTP implementations such as chrony or the NTP reference server this only implements a client side, and does not bother with the full NTP complexity, focusing only on querying time from one remote server and synchronizing the local clock to it.”
“Unless you intend to serve NTP to networked clients or want to connect to local hardware clocks this simple NTP client should be more than appropriate for most installations,” said systemd developer Lennart Poettering.
Systemd 213 features numerous other improvements and fixes as well. For example, the queue “seqnum” interface of libudev has been disabled because it was incompatible with device namespacing, “systemctl list-timers” and “systemctl list-sockets” gained a --recursive switch for showing units of these types also for all local containers, a new RebootArgument= setting has been added for service units (it can be used to specify a kernel reboot argument), and a new FailureAction= setting has been added for service units
Also, hostnamed has been updated and is now able to also expose the kernel name, release, and version on the bus, the bootchart tool can now show cgroup information in the graphs it generates, the CFS CPU quota cgroup attribute is now exposed for services, IPIP and SIT tunnel support has been added, and the systemd-networkd-wait-online tool is now enabled by default.
Debian has just adopted the use of systemd for its distribution and decided to give up on upstart. Ubuntu will soon follow and the developers will start to implement it into their system. This means that it's very likely that more patches will be integrated in the future for systemd.
A detailed changelog of the new release is available in the mailing list. You can download the systemd 213 source package right now from Softpedia. Regular users will not be able to do anything with it and they should wait until it's officially integrated into their own distro.