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, is now at version 216 and is available for download.
The systemd developers have released a new version of their software and they managed to push a lot of changes and improvements in this latest iteration. In fact, systemd has received a lot of updates in the past few months and the rhythm of the releases don't seem to slow down.
“systemd-sysusers gained a new line type ‘r’ for configuring which UID/GID ranges to allocate system users/groups from. Lines of type ‘u’ may now add an additional column that specifies the home directory for the system user to be created. Also, systemd-sysusers may now optionally read user information from STDIN instead of a file.”
“This is useful for invoking it from RPM preinst scriptlets that need to create users before the first RPM file is installed since these files might need to be owned by them. A new %sysusers_create_inline RPM macro has been introduced to do just that. systemd-sysusers now updates the shadow files as well as the user/group databases, which should enhance compatibility with certain tools like grpck,” says systemd developer Lennart Poettering.
systemd 216 comes with a wealth of changes. For example, timedated no longer reads NTP implementation unit names from /usr/lib/systemd/ntp-units.d/*.list, a few bus APIs of PID 1 now optionally consult PolicyKit to permit access for otherwise unprivileged clients under certain conditions, /etc/machine-info now has new fields for configuring the deployment environment of the machine, hostnamectl has been updated with a new command that helps update the /etc/machine-info fields, and systemd-timesyncd has been updated to automatically acquire NTP server information from systemd-networkd.
Moreover, the devs have explained that systemd-resolved now includes a caching DNS stub resolver and a complete LLMNR name resolution implementation, a new NSS module nss-mymachines has been added and this automatically resolves the names of all local registered containers, a new client tool called “networkctl” for systemd-networkd has been implemented, logind learned a new session type “web,” and the kdbus client code has been updated to use the new Linux 3.17 memfd subsystem.
A detailed changelog of the new release is available in the mailing list. You can download the systemd 216 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.