[systemd-devel] [ANNOUNCE] systemd 217

[Lennart Poettering]

Heya,

Many new features, even more bugfixes!

http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/systemd-217.tar.xz

CHANGES WITH 217:

        * journalctl gained the new options -t/--identifier= to match
          on the syslog identifier (aka "tag"), as well as --utc to
          show log timestamps in the UTC timezone. journalctl now also
          accepts -n/--lines=all to disable line capping in a pager.

        * Services can notify the manager before they start a reload
          (by sending RELOADING=1) or shutdown (by sending
          STOPPING=1). This allows the manager to track and show the
          internal state of daemons and closes a race condition when
          the process is still running but has closed its D-Bus
          connection.

        * Services with Type=oneshot do not have to have any ExecStart
          commands anymore.

        * User units are now loaded also from
          $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/systemd/user/. This is similar to the
          /run/systemd/user directory that was already previously
          supported, but is under the control of the user.

        * Job timeouts (i.e. time-outs on the time a job that is
          queued stays in the run queue) can now optionally result in
          immediate reboot or power-off actions (JobTimeoutAction= and
          JobTimeoutRebootArgument=). This is useful on ".target"
          units, to limit the maximum time a target remains
          undispatched in the run queue, and to trigger an emergency
          operation in such a case. This is now used by default to
          turn off the system if boot-up (as defined by everything in
          basic.target) hangs and does not complete for at least
          15min. Also, if power-off or reboot hang for at least 30min
          an immediate power-off/reboot operation is triggered. This
          functionality is particularly useful to increase reliability
          on embedded devices, but also on laptops which might
          accidentally get powered on when carried in a backpack and
          whose boot stays stuck in a hard disk encryption passphrase
          question.

        * systemd-logind can be configured to also handle lid switch
          events even when the machine is docked or multiple displays
          are attached (HandleLidSwitchDocked= option).

        * A helper binary and a service have been added which can be
          used to resume from hibernation in the initramfs. A
          generator will parse the resume= option on the kernel
          command-line to trigger resume.

        * A user console daemon systemd-consoled has been
          added. Currently, it is a preview, and will so far open a
          single terminal on each session of the user marked as
          Desktop=systemd-console.

        * Route metrics can be specified for DHCP routes added by
          systemd-networkd.

        * The SELinux context of socket-activated services can be set
          from the information provided by the networking stack
          (SELinuxContextFromNet= option).

        * Userspace firmware loading support has been removed and
          the minimum supported kernel version is thus bumped to 3.7.

        * Timeout for udev workers has been increased from 1 to 3
          minutes, but a warning will be printed after 1 minute to
          help diagnose kernel modules that take a long time to load.

        * Udev rules can now remove tags on devices with TAG-="foobar".

        * systemd's readahead implementation has been removed. In many
          circumstances it didn't give expected benefits even for
          rotational disk drives and was becoming less relevant in the
          age of SSDs. As none of the developers has been using
          rotating media anymore, and nobody stepped up to actively
          maintain this component of systemd it has now been removed.

        * Swap units can use Discard= to specify discard options.
          Discard options specified for swaps in /etc/fstab are now
          respected.

        * Docker containers are now detected as a separate type of
          virtualization.

        * The Password Agent protocol gained support for queries where
          the user input is shown, useful e.g. for user names.
          systemd-ask-password gained a new --echo option to turn that
          on.

        * The default sysctl.d/ snippets will now set:

                net.core.default_qdisc = fq_codel

          This selects Fair Queuing Controlled Delay as the default
          queuing discipline for network interfaces. fq_codel helps
          fight the network bufferbloat problem. It is believed to be
          a good default with no tuning required for most workloads.
          Downstream distributions may override this choice. On 10Gbit
          servers that do not do forwarding, "fq" may perform better.
          Systems without a good clocksource should use "pfifo_fast".

        * If kdbus is enabled during build a new option BusPolicy= is
          available for service units, that allows locking all service
          processes into a stricter bus policy, in order to limit
          access to various bus services, or even hide most of them
          from the service's view entirely.

        * networkctl will now show the .network and .link file
          networkd has applied to a specific interface.

        * sd-login gained a new API call sd_session_get_desktop() to
          query which desktop environment has been selected for a
          session.

        * UNIX utmp support is now compile-time optional to support
          legacy-free systems.

        * systemctl gained two new commands "add-wants" and
          "add-requires" for pulling in units from specific targets
          easily.

        * If the word "rescue" is specified on the kernel command line
          the system will now boot into rescue mode (aka
          rescue.target), which was previously available only by
          specifying "1" or "systemd.unit=rescue.target" on the kernel
          command line. This new kernel command line option nicely
          mirrors the already existing "emergency" kernel command line
          option.

        * New kernel command line options mount.usr=, mount.usrflags=,
          mount.usrfstype= have been added that match root=, rootflags=,
          rootfstype= but allow mounting a specific file system to
          /usr.

        * The $NOTIFY_SOCKET is now also passed to control processes of
          services, not only the main process.

        * This version reenables support for fsck's -l switch. This
          means at least version v2.25 of util-linux is required for
          operation, otherwise dead-locks on device nodes may
          occur. Again: you need to update util-linux to at least
          v2.25 when updating systemd to v217.

        * The "multi-seat-x" tool has been removed from systemd, as
          its functionality has been integrated into X servers 1.16,
          and the tool is hence redundant. It is recommended to update
          display managers invoking this tool to simply invoke X
          directly from now on, again.

        * Support for the new ALLOW_INTERACTIVE_AUTHORIZATION D-Bus
          message flag has been added for all of systemd's PolicyKit
          authenticated method calls has been added. In particular
          this now allows optional interactive authorization via
          PolicyKit for many of PID1's privileged operations such as
          unit file enabling and disabling.

        * "udevadm hwdb --update" learnt a new switch "--usr" for
          placing the rebuilt hardware database in /usr instead of
          /etc. When used only hardware database entries stored in
          /usr will be used, and any user database entries in /etc are
          ignored. This functionality is useful for vendors to ship a
          pre-built database on systems where local configuration is
          unnecessary or unlikely.

        * Calendar time specifications in .timer units now also
          understand the strings "semi-annually", "quarterly" and
          "minutely" as shortcuts (in addition to the preexisting
          "anually", "hourly", ...).

        * systemd-tmpfiles will now correctly create files in /dev
          at boot which are marked for creation only at boot. It is
          recommended to always create static device nodes with 'c!'
          and 'b!', so that they are created only at boot and not
          overwritten at runtime.

        * When the watchdog logic is used for a service (WatchdogSec=)
          and the watchdog timeout is hit the service will now be
          terminated with SIGABRT (instead of just SIGTERM), in order
          to make sure a proper coredump and backtrace is
          generated. This ensures that hanging services will result in
          similar coredump/backtrace behaviour as services that hit a
          segmentation fault.

        Contributions from: Andreas Henriksson, Andrei Borzenkov,
        Angus Gibson, Ansgar Burchardt, Ben Wolsieffer, Brandon L.
        Black, Christian Hesse, Cristian Rodríguez, Daniel Buch,
        Daniele Medri, Daniel Mack, Dan Williams, Dave Reisner, David
        Herrmann, David Sommerseth, David Strauss, Emil Renner
        Berthing, Eric Cook, Evangelos Foutras, Filipe Brandenburger,
        Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri, Hans de Goede, Harald Hoyer, Hristo
        Venev, Hugo Grostabussiat, Ivan Shapovalov, Jan Janssen, Jan
        Synacek, Jonathan Liu, Juho Son, Karel Zak, Kay Sievers, Klaus
        Purer, Koen Kooi, Lennart Poettering, Lukas Nykryn, Lukasz
        Skalski, Łukasz Stelmach, Mantas Mikulėnas, Marcel Holtmann,
        Marius Tessmann, Marko Myllynen, Martin Pitt, Michael Biebl,
        Michael Marineau, Michael Olbrich, Michael Scherer, Michal
        Schmidt, Michal Sekletar, Miroslav Lichvar, Patrik Flykt,
        Philippe De Swert, Piotr Drąg, Rahul Sundaram, Richard
        Weinberger, Robert Milasan, Ronny Chevalier, Ruben Kerkhof,
        Santiago Vila, Sergey Ptashnick, Simon McVittie, Sjoerd
        Simons, Stefan Brüns, Steven Allen, Steven Noonan, Susant
        Sahani, Sylvain Plantefève, Thomas Hindoe Paaboel Andersen,
        Timofey Titovets, Tobias Hunger, Tom Gundersen, Torstein
        Husebø, Umut Tezduyar Lindskog, WaLyong Cho, Zbigniew
        Jędrzejewski-Szmek.

        -- Berlin, 2014-10-28

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering, Red Hat