systemd

7️⃣ Here's the 7th post highlighting key new features of the upcoming v262 release of systemd. #systemd262 #systemd

In systemd we have a lot of CLI tools that users may invoke. We try to provide relatively uniform interfaces for them, i.e. there's always a man page, and always a --help switch, which are structured roughly the same way.

In previous systemd versions the command line interfaces and their --help texts were maintained with only little shared code in the various tools…

They have started to store birthday info in systemd...

Are they really planning to integrate age verification in systemd too? That's terrible.

#systemd #Linux #AgeVerification #Privacy

We forked the #KDE Plasma Login Manager. It now runs on #X11, drops privileges after init, and supports #systemd-free too. We tested it on Artix Linux with OpenRC, CachyOS with systemd, and on the #FreeBSD-based GhostBSD. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTnV7-nfgX4 https://github.com/Sonic-DE/sonic-login-manager

#SonicDE

It's that time again! The systemd v261 release is coming closer. Let's restart the "what's new" series of posts for this iteration! Hence:

1️⃣ Here's the 1st post highlighting key new features of the upcoming v261 release of systemd. #systemd261 #systemd

systemd-repart is systemd's dynamic disk partitioner and image generation tool. It only deals with GPT disk labels – or more precisely, it only dealt with GPT disk labels *so* *far*. With v261 there's…

2️⃣ Here's the 2nd post highlighting key new features of the upcoming v261 release of systemd. #systemd261 #systemd

When you care for a more than a single system, it is often advisable to roll out new stuff in a staged fashion: first 1% of your fleet should get it, and only after the results are in and all is good, you up it to 10%, and then to 25% and finally to 100% (or in other steps like this).

With v261, systemd is going to help you with this to some degree:

3️⃣ Here's the 3rd post highlighting key new features of the upcoming v261 release of systemd. #systemd261 #systemd

One very annoying error situation when developing operating systems is a boot loop: something fails while the system is still booting, and the thing immediately reboots, and you don't even get a chance to look at the screen to figure out what is going on. And then the system starts up again, and fails again, and so on and so on…

7️⃣ Here's the 7th post highlighting key new features of the upcoming v261 release of systemd. #systemd261 #systemd

Installing image-based OSes is comparatively simple: instead of acquiring a large number of packages, unpacking them all and running scriptlets for them, you basically just have to stream in a /usr/ partition and you are done.

Well, basically. In reality it's a tiny bit more complex: you also need to install a boot loader and a kernel to the ESP, and maybe set up an XBOOTLDR…

5️⃣ Here's the 5th post highlighting key new features of the upcoming v261 release of systemd. #systemd261 #systemd

When we first put together systemd-boot, it supported only UAPI.1 Type #1 entries: small text files with separate lines for kernel, initrd, and a few other fields. Soon later we added Type #2 entries, i.e. UKIs that are self-descriptive and which you just drop in the right dir. They have nice security and robustness properties, but they also had drawbacks, because they were very…

6️⃣ Here's the 6th post highlighting key new features of the upcoming v261 release of systemd. #systemd261 #systemd

Two of the first questions you are typically asked by OS installation wizards when setting up a new Linux system are "Which language do you prefer?" and "Which keyboard mapping would you like?".

In particular the latter question I found irritating, and that for the last 20 years or so: if I have a physical German keyboard in my laptop, why can't the system make the…

4️⃣ Here's the 4th post highlighting key new features of the upcoming v261 release of systemd. #systemd261 #systemd

On many servers and embedded devices serial console console access on boot is absolutely essential. For that reason, firmwares (UEFI), boot loaders, and the kernel itself all support sending their boot time output to a serial port, and receiving input from it.

Configuring serial consoles in the boot loader and Linux is kinda painful though: you need to know some…

2️⃣ Here's the 2nd post highlighting key new features of the upcoming v262 release of systemd. #systemd262 #systemd

The Linux kernel 7.1 added support for setting extended attributes on socket inodes: both for AF_UNIX entrypoint socket inodes in the file system hierarchy, and for listener/connected sockets in the "sockfs" pseudo file system.

This is truly useful, because it allows attaching descriptive metadata on sockets that can be very cheaply read without connecting to them.

1️⃣0️⃣ Here's the 10th post highlighting key new features of the upcoming v261 release of systemd. #systemd261 #systemd

I believe that TPMs are great technology for securing systems, in particular for implementing full disk encryption. In particular in non-interactive environments (i.e. servers, embedded) they are great for holding disk encryption keys in a reasonably secure fashion.

However, not all systems have a TPM. Bummer. While many VM environments nowadays do provide an sw tpm, it's not…

9️⃣ Here's the 9th post highlighting key new features of the upcoming v261 release of systemd. #systemd261 #systemd

When operating systems are deployed in the cloud they typically need to be parameterized for first boot, so that they automatically deploy the right configuration, the right payloads, and join whatever infrastructure tooling is appropriate.

This provisioning traditionally happens with the "cloud-init" package (or various alternatives). These tools typically implement the…

1️⃣1️⃣ Here's the 11th post highlighting key new features of the upcoming v261 release of systemd. #systemd261 #systemd

In the previous installment we already talked a lot about secrets when booting without a TPM. Let's continue in this general area: with the "boot secret" described in the previous posting we now have a random but persistent per-installation secret that userspace will receive. But how precisely do we want to consume it?

We could of course directly consume it from FDE, i.e.…

8️⃣ Here's the 8th post highlighting key new features of the upcoming v261 release of systemd. #systemd261 #systemd

When you manage a fleet a systems, it's important to minimize differences between systems, in order to unify handling. But at the same time systems will differ in purpose, in location, in hardware properties, architectures, in connectivity, deployment state, in payloads and more.

To schedule work on the machines it's often necessary to condition them properly, to take all these…

[$] A truce in the Manjaro governance struggle

Members of the Manjaro Linux distribution's community have published a "Manjaro 2.0 Manifesto" that contains a list of complaints and a demand to restructure the project to provide [...]

https://lwn.net/Articles/1063717/ #LWN #Linux #ArchLinux #Git #Firefox #systemd

1️⃣0️⃣ Here's the 10th post highlighting key new features of the just published v260 release of systemd. #systemd260 #systemd

As systemd gains more and more TPM support we increasingly run into problems with actual real-life TPM implementations. TPMs run non-trivial firmware after all, and … let's just say …, not all of it is of the highest quality.

When TPM operations fail, and we get a "clean" error back, then we can relatively nicely handle this, implement fallback code paths, and move on.

1️⃣1️⃣ Here's the 11th post highlighting key new features of the just published v260 release of systemd. #systemd260 #systemd

ARM laptops have recently started moving from the fringes of the Linux world more towards the middle. In the ARM world the nice ACPI-based auto-discovery of devices that PCs have is not really that common, and Devicetree reigns instead. While ACPI is somewhat OS independent, and hence can easily be provided…

1️⃣2️⃣ Here's the 12th post highlighting key new features of the just published v260 release of systemd. #systemd260 #systemd

D-Bus has been tremendously successful as an IPC system, but as you probably are aware within the systemd project we have been pursuing adding more and more Varlink IPC interfaces to our services instead – for a variety of reasons.

In v260 we added minimal Varlink support to one key component, that needs to be available during early boot, and where D-Bus is hence…

1️⃣3️⃣ Here's the 13th post highlighting key new features of the just published v260 release of systemd. #systemd260 #systemd

systemd-vmspawn is systemd's wrapper around qemu, that integrates it nicely with various of systemd's interfaces and subsystems, while providing an interface closely resembling systemd-nspawn's.

There's one really useful switch systemd-nspawn has that systemd-vmspawn so far didn't:

Hey @kde with the recent birthdate field being introduced into systemd and the lead developer being obnoxiously stupid about it, Plasma desktop relying more on systemd feels wrong.

Given the circumstances, I urge you to please reconsider systemd dependency on KDE platform and if possible, please think of alternatives.

When you said X11 is getting axed from the codebase, I was ok with because Wayland has improved significantly over the years and offers more almost all the functionality from X11; systemd is different.

This post is an attempt to make my case as a (happy and satisfied) KDE Plasma user for few years so please think again about getting in bed with that project.

#kde #systemd #ageverification #linux

RE: https://mastodon.social/@daandemeyer/116144059697098766

1️⃣9️⃣ Here's the 19th post highlighting key new features of the recently published v260 release of systemd. #systemd260 #systemd

For this one, I am just gonna quote @daandemeyer about the delegation of multiuple UID ranges.

2️⃣0️⃣ Here's the 20th post highlighting key new features of the recently published v260 release of systemd. #systemd260 #systemd

One ongoing project inside of systemd is to rework systemd-nspawn to not do its own namespacing/sandboxing but make it mostly just a frontend to systemd's own namespacing/sandboxing that is implemented for system services. The goal is to make it play a role similar to systemd-run: i.e. a command line tool that just allocates a transient service, and thus simplify…

2️⃣1️⃣ Here's the 21st and last post highlighting key new features of the recently published v260 release of systemd. #systemd260 #systemd

If you have been following this series of posts I am sure you recognized some repeating themes. One of them is the progressing Varlinkification of systemd's functionality. The last item on my list of features to post about for v260 is another one in this theme:

"bootctl install" is what gets systemd-boot installed in your ESP. With v260 there's now a Varlink…