This post is part of a series of notes I’ve taken at FOSDEM 2015 in Brussels, Belgium. If you’re interested, have a look at the other posts.

A packed room at Fosdem for Lennart Poettering’s talk on systemd, the 2015 edition.

systemd is now a core component of most major distributions. In this talk I want to give an overview over everything new in the systemd project over the last year, and what to expect over the next year. fosdem talk description

There were no slides. None whatsoever. No presentation. He just talked.

Notes are scribbled down really quickly, so errors may occur. Don’t quote this directly. If you spot any errors, please let me know. ;-)

Video available

The video recording of the talk is now available online. Someone was kind of enough to mirror this on YouTube – I’m not sure if this is allowed by Fosdem, but for the time being I’ll embed it here.

If you’re not interested in the video, the talk is written down below!

Transcript

user space components in systemd for dbus are mostly done (new library for C developers)

nspawn (a minimal container manager) was originally made to test the init-system, without rebooting the box every time (for testing systemd development). It grew over time to a viable (minimal) container manager. Supports RAW images and docker-like containers.

machined: a virtual machine registration manager, takes inspiration from Solaris’ “zone” concept

in general: more container features are to be expected

the goal is have all tools be “container” aware, so journald can show the logs/messages from the host as well as all the containers running on it

next version (released in ~2 weeks) of systemd will have additional btrfs support

minimal firewall support, which is service oriented . Ie: allow Apache access in the firewall instead of saying “allow port :80” access. Gives better support for the variety of ports services can listen on. Would also prevent port-hijacking from other services, since it’s bound to the service.

. Ie: allow Apache access in the firewall instead of saying “allow port :80” access. Gives better support for the variety of ports services can listen on. Would also prevent port-hijacking from other services, since it’s bound to the service. consoled: support for high DPI screens and unicode

systemctl-cat, systemctl-edit: cat the config file of the unit you specify, so you don’t need to know the path on the system (ie: systemctl-cat apache2.service ). The systemctl-edit apache2.service immediately opens the unit file to edit. After a save, the service can get reloaded automatically.

). The immediately opens the unit file to edit. After a save, the service can get reloaded automatically. nss-getmyhostname: a function call to get the local hostname, in case /etc/* is entirely empty (for stateless hosts).

Part deux