Canonical announced the release of Snapd 2.27 Snappy daemon for Ubuntu Linux and other supported GNU/Linux distributions. This is a major release that adds significant improvements and new features.

The biggest new feature implemented in the Snapd 2.27 release is Android boot support, which should bring the Ubuntu Snappy technologies to a wide range of devices that are powered by Google's Linux-based Android mobile operating system, implementing support for transactional updates.

"The snapd boot sequence can now handle Android-style boot management. We’re especially happy about this as it opens up a new range of devices for snapd that will support transactional updates of the OS and the kernel with automatic reverts on boot failures," said Gustavo Niemeyer.

Another interesting feature introduces in the Snapd 2.27 release is the snap-update-ns tool, which has been in development for a very long time. The tool promises to allow for changes to be performed dynamically in the file system inside the Snap mount namespace, which wasn't possible until now.

Additionally, Snapd 2.27 comes with new "install" and "remove" hooks that let Snaps to implement a logic that's enabled only when it's removed from the system or installed for the first time, and adds support for the snapctl tool, which opens up a communication line between any Snap and the Snapd daemon.

New and updated interfaces, new aliases and commands

Among other improvements implemented in Snapd 2.27, we can mention a new "title" field designed to hold a high-level, normally uppercased name for the Snap app, new "--unaliased" parameter to the "snap install" command for installing Snaps that don't have any aliases enabled, and new "--last=" parameter to the "snap abort" and "watch" commands, allowing them to operate on the last change.

The seccomp argument filtering was re-enabled in this release of Snapd, which renames the "snap change" command to "snap tasks," adds new "search" alias for the "snap find" command, adds support for displaying snap types under the Notes column via the "snap list" command, as well as suppor for the "snap info" command to display more information.

Lastly, Snapd 2.27 introduces the broadcom-asic-control, greengrass-support, and password-manager-service interfaces, and updates numerous others, including alsa, browser-support, log-observe, mir, mount-observe, network-control, optical-drive, optical-observe, pulseaudio, screen-inhibit-control, system-observe, timezone-control, unity7, and x11.