It has been way too long since my last status update on systemd. Here's another short, incomprehensive status update on what we worked on for systemd since then.

We have been working hard to turn systemd into the most viable set of components to build operating systems, appliances and devices from, and make it the best choice for servers, for desktops and for embedded environments alike. I think we have a really convincing set of features now, but we are actively working on making it even better.

Here's a list of some more and some less interesting features, in no particular order:

We added an automatic pager to systemctl (and related tools), similar to how git has it. systemctl learnt a new switch --failed , to show only failed services. You may now start services immediately, overrding all dependency logic by passing --ignore-dependencies to systemctl . This is mostly a debugging tool and nothing people should use in real life. Sending SIGKILL as final part of the implicit shutdown logic of services is now optional and may be configured with the SendSIGKILL= option individually for each service. We split off the Vala/Gtk tools into its own project systemd-ui . systemd-tmpfiles learnt file globbing and creating FIFO special files as well as character and block device nodes, and symlinks. It also is capable of relabelling certain directories at boot now (in the SELinux sense). Immediately before shuttding dow we will now invoke all binaries found in /lib/systemd/system-shutdown/ , which is useful for debugging late shutdown. You may now globally control where STDOUT/STDERR of services goes (unless individual service configuration overrides it). There's a new ConditionVirtualization= option, that makes systemd skip a specific service if a certain virtualization technology is found or not found. Similar, we now have a new option to detect whether a certain security technology (such as SELinux) is available, called ConditionSecurity= . There's also ConditionCapability= to check whether a certain process capability is in the capability bounding set of the system. There's also a new ConditionFileIsExecutable= , ConditionPathIsMountPoint= , ConditionPathIsReadWrite= , ConditionPathIsSymbolicLink= . The file system condition directives now support globbing. Service conditions may now be "triggering" and "mandatory", meaning that they can be a necessary requirement to hold for a service to start, or simply one trigger among many. At boot time we now print warnings if: /usr is on a split-off partition but not already mounted by an initrd; if /etc/mtab is not a symlink to /proc/mounts ; CONFIG_CGROUPS is not enabled in the kernel. We'll also expose this as tainted flag on the bus. You may now boot the same OS image on a bare metal machine and in Linux namespace containers and will get a clean boot in both cases. This is more complicated than it sounds since device management with udev or write access to /sys , /proc/sys or things like /dev/kmsg is not available in a container. This makes systemd a first-class choice for managing thin container setups. This is all tested with systemd's own systemd-nspawn tool but should work fine in LXC setups, too. Basically this means that you do not have to adjust your OS manually to make it work in a container environment, but will just work out of the box. It also makes it easier to convert real systems into containers. We now automatically spawn gettys on HVC ttys when booting in VMs. We introduced /etc/machine-id as a generalization of D-Bus machine ID logic. See this blog story for more information. On stateless/read-only systems the machine ID is initialized randomly at boot. In virtualized environments it may be passed in from the machine manager (with qemu's -uuid switch, or via the container interface). All of the systemd-specific /etc/fstab mount options are now in the x-systemd-xyz format. To make it easy to find non-converted services we will now implicitly prefix all LSB and SysV init script descriptions with the strings " LSB: " resp. " SYSV: ". We introduced /run and made it a hard dependency of systemd. This directory is now widely accepted and implemented on all relevant Linux distributions. systemctl can now execute all its operations remotely too ( -H switch). We now ship systemd-nspawn, a really powerful tool that can be used to start containers for debugging, building and testing, much like chroot(1). It is useful to just get a shell inside a build tree, but is good enough to boot up a full system in it, too. If we query the user for a hard disk password at boot he may hit TAB to hide the asterisks we normally show for each key that is entered, for extra paranoia. We don't enable udev-settle.service anymore, which is only required for certain legacy software that still hasn't been updated to follow devices coming and going cleanly. We now include a tool that can plot boot speed graphs, similar to bootchartd, called systemd-analyze . At boot, we now initialize the kernel's binfmt_misc logic with the data from /etc/binfmt.d . systemctl now recognizes if it is run in a chroot() environment and will work accordingly (i.e. apply changes to the tree it is run in, instead of talking to the actual PID 1 for this). It also has a new --root= switch to work on an OS tree from outside of it. There's a new unit dependency type OnFailureIsolate= that allows entering a different target whenever a certain unit fails. For example, this is interesting to enter emergency mode if file system checks of crucial file systems failed. Socket units may now listen on Netlink sockets, special files from /proc and POSIX message queues, too. There's a new IgnoreOnIsolate= flag which may be used to ensure certain units are left untouched by isolation requests. There's a new IgnoreOnSnapshot= flag which may be used to exclude certain units from snapshot units when they are created. There's now small mechanism services for changing the local hostname and other host meta data, changing the system locale and console settings and the system clock. We now limit the capability bounding set for a number of our internal services by default. Plymouth may now be disabled globally with plymouth.enable=0 on the kernel command line. We now disallocate VTs when a getty finished running (and optionally other tools run on VTs). This adds extra security since it clears up the scrollback buffer so that subsequent users cannot get access to a user's session output. In socket units there are now options to control the IP_TRANSPARENT , SO_BROADCAST , SO_PASSCRED , SO_PASSSEC socket options. The receive and send buffers of socket units may now be set larger than the default system settings if needed by using SO_{RCV,SND}BUFFORCE. We now set the hardware timezone as one of the first things in PID 1, in order to avoid time jumps during normal userspace operation, and to guarantee sensible times on all generated logs. We also no longer save the system clock to the RTC on shutdown, assuming that this is done by the clock control tool when the user modifies the time, or automatically by the kernel if NTP is enabled. The SELinux directory got moved from /selinux to /sys/fs/selinux . We added a small service systemd-logind that keeps tracks of logged in users and their sessions. It creates control groups for them, implements the XDG_RUNTIME_DIR specification for them, maintains seats and device node ACLs and implements shutdown/idle inhibiting for clients. It auto-spawns gettys on all local VTs when the user switches to them (instead of starting six of them unconditionally), thus reducing the resource foot print by default. It has a D-Bus interface as well as a simple synchronous library interface. This mechanism obsoletes ConsoleKit which is now deprecated and should no longer be used. There's now full, automatic multi-seat support, and this is enabled in GNOME 3.4. Just by pluging in new seat hardware you get a new login screen on your seat's screen. There is now an option ControlGroupModify= to allow services to change the properties of their control groups dynamically, and one to make control groups persistent in the tree ( ControlGroupPersistent= ) so that they can be created and maintained by external tools. We now jump back into the initrd in shutdown, so that it can detach the root file system and the storage devices backing it. This allows (for the first time!) to reliably undo complex storage setups on shutdown and leave them in a clean state. systemctl now supports presets, a way for distributions and administrators to define their own policies on whether services should be enabled or disabled by default on package installation. systemctl now has high-level verbs for masking/unmasking units. There's also a new command ( systemctl list-unit-files ) for determining the list of all installed unit file files and whether they are enabled or not. We now apply sysctl variables to each new network device, as it appears. This makes /etc/sysctl.d compatible with hot-plug network devices. There's limited profiling for SELinux start-up perfomance built into PID 1. There's a new switch PrivateNetwork= to turn of any network access for a specific service. Service units may now include configuration for control group parameters. A few (such as MemoryLimit= ) are exposed with high-level options, and all others are available via the generic ControlGroupAttribute= setting. There's now the option to mount certain cgroup controllers jointly at boot. We do this now for cpu and cpuacct by default. We added the journal and turned it on by default. All service output is now written to the Journal by default, regardless whether it is sent via syslog or simply written to stdout/stderr. Both message streams end up in the same location and are interleaved the way they should. All log messages even from the kernel and from early boot end up in the journal. Now, no service output gets unnoticed and is saved and indexed at the same location. systemctl status will now show the last 10 log lines for each service, directly from the journal. We now show the progress of fsck at boot on the console, again. We also show the much loved colorful [ OK ] status messages at boot again, as known from most SysV implementations. We merged udev into systemd. We implemented and documented interfaces to container managers and initrds for passing execution data to systemd. We also implemented and documented an interface for storage daemons that are required to back the root file system. There are two new options in service files to propagate reload requests between several units. systemd-cgls won't show kernel threads by default anymore, or show empty control groups. We added a new tool systemd-cgtop that shows resource usage of whole services in a top(1) like fasion. systemd may now supervise services in watchdog style. If enabled for a service the daemon daemon has to ping PID 1 in regular intervals or is otherwise considered failed (which might then result in restarting it, or even rebooting the machine, as configured). Also, PID 1 is capable of pinging a hardware watchdog. Putting this together, the hardware watchdogs PID 1 and PID 1 then watchdogs specific services. This is highly useful for high-availability servers as well as embedded machines. Since watchdog hardware is noawadays built into all modern chipsets (including desktop chipsets), this should hopefully help to make this a more widely used functionality. We added support for a new kernel command line option systemd.setenv= to set an environment variable system-wide. By default services which are started by systemd will have SIGPIPE set to ignored. The Unix SIGPIPE logic is used to reliably implement shell pipelines and when left enabled in services is usually just a source of bugs and problems. You may now configure the rate limiting that is applied to restarts of specific services. Previously the rate limiting parameters were hard-coded (similar to SysV). There's now support for loading the IMA integrity policy into the kernel early in PID 1, similar to how we already did it with the SELinux policy. There's now an official API to schedule and query scheduled shutdowns. We changed the license from GPL2+ to LGPL2.1+. We made systemd-detect-virt an official tool in the tool set. Since we already had code to detect certain VM and container environments we now added an official tool for administrators to make use of in shell scripts and suchlike. We documented numerous interfaces systemd introduced.

Much of the stuff above is already available in Fedora 15 and 16, or will be made available in the upcoming Fedora 17.

And that's it for now. There's a lot of other stuff in the git commits, but most of it is smaller and I will it thus spare you.

I'd like to thank everybody who contributed to systemd over the past years.

Thanks for your interest!