The latest version of systemd can be downloaded from Softpedia

Jun 12, 2014 08:09 GMT  ·  By

systemd 214, 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 been released and is now available for download.

The developers have made quite a few changes to the software and, as usual, it's difficult to list them all. Unlike a few of the previous releases, this is actually safe to use and users have been advised to upgrade to the new version, although it's more likely that the distro makers will take care of that.

systemd has seen many updates and improvements in 214 and the devs keep on fixing and adding new features with each new edition.

“Here it is, version 214. Stuffed with great new features, improvements in all areas, in particular when it comes to security (file system sandboxing services! minimizing privileges of our daemons!), networking (three new interface types are now supported by networkd!) and socket units (four new settings!). What I find the most exciting change: a first step towards a state-less system: we will now rebuild /var if it is empty on boot.”

“As next step (planned for the next release): add the infrastructure to support boots with /etc empty, too (or to turn this around: with a tmpfs as root and only /usr mounted in from a read-only vendor tree),” said systemd developer Lennart Poettering.

systemd 214 features numerous other changes as well. For example, udev now tries to lock the disk device node while it executes events for the disk or any of its partitions, the “-l” switch for fsck invocations has been dropped temporarily, the dependency on libattr has been removed, the virtualization detection now works without privileges, systemd-networkd now runs under its own “systemd-network” user, and systemd-resolved is now able to run under its own “systemd-resolve” user, with no capabilities remaining.

Also, systemd-networkd gained support for setting up “veth” virtual ethernet devices for container connectivity, systemd-networkd will no longer automatically attempt to manually load kernel modules, the resolv.conf file systemd-resolved generated has been moved to /run/systemd/resolve/, the /dev/log socket and /dev/initctl FIFO have been moved to /run, and much more.

A detailed changelog of the new release is available in the mailing list. You can download the systemd 214 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.