[systemd-devel] [ANNOUNCE] systemd v228

[David Herrmann]

Hey!

We just tagged a new release, slightly delayed due to the conference.
It includes several new features, some old cruft removed, and many
bugfixes!

CHANGES WITH 228:

        * A number of properties previously only settable in unit
          files are now also available as properties to set when
          creating transient units programmatically via the bus, as it
          is exposed with systemd-run's --property=
          setting. Specifically, these are: SyslogIdentifier=,
          SyslogLevelPrefix=, TimerSlackNSec=, OOMScoreAdjust=,
          EnvironmentFile=, ReadWriteDirectories=,
          ReadOnlyDirectories=, InaccessibleDirectories=,
          ProtectSystem=, ProtectHome=, RuntimeDirectory=.

        * When creating transient services via the bus API it is now
          possible to pass in a set of file descriptors to use as
          STDIN/STDOUT/STDERR for the invoked process.

        * Slice units may now be created transiently via the bus APIs,
          similar to the way service and scope units may already be
          created transiently.

        * Wherever systemd expects a calendar timestamp specification
          (like in journalctl's --since= and --until= switches) UTC
          timestamps are now supported. Timestamps suffixed with "UTC"
          are now considered to be in Universal Time Coordinated
          instead of the local timezone. Also, timestamps may now
          optionally be specified with sub-second accuracy. Both of
          these additions also apply to recurring calendar event
          specification, such as OnCalendar= in timer units.

        * journalctl gained a new "--sync" switch that asks the
          journal daemon to write all so far unwritten log messages to
          disk and sync the files, before returning.

        * systemd-tmpfiles learned two new line types "q" and "Q" that
          operate like "v", but also set up a basic btrfs quota
          hierarchy when used on a btrfs file system with quota
          enabled.

        * tmpfiles' "v", "q" and "Q" will now create a plain directory
          instead of a subvolume (even on a btrfs file system) if the
          root directory is a plain directory, and not a
          subvolume. This should simplify things with certain chroot()
          environments which are not aware of the concept of btrfs
          subvolumes.

        * systemd-detect-virt gained a new --chroot switch to detect
          whether execution takes place in a chroot() environment.

        * CPUAffinity= now takes CPU index ranges in addition to
          individual indexes.

        * The various memory-related resource limit settings (such as
          LimitAS=) now understand the usual K, M, G, ... suffixes to
          the base of 1024 (IEC). Similar, the time-related resource
          limit settings understand the usual min, h, day, ...
          suffixes now.

        * There's a new system.conf setting DefaultTasksMax= to
          control the default TasksMax= setting for services and
          scopes running on the system. (TasksMax= is the primary
          setting that exposes the "pids" cgroup controller on systemd
          and was introduced in the previous systemd release.) The
          setting now defaults to 512, which means services that are
          not explicitly configured otherwise will only be able to
          create 512 processes or threads at maximum, from this
          version on. Note that this means that thread- or
          process-heavy services might need to be reconfigured to set
          TasksMax= to a higher value. It is sufficient to set
          TasksMax= in these specific unit files to a higher value, or
          even "infinity". Similar, there's now a logind.conf setting
          UserTasksMax= that defaults to 4096 and limits the total
          number of processes or tasks each user may own
          concurrently. nspawn containers also have the TasksMax=
          value set by default now, to 8192. Note that all of this
          only has an effect if the "pids" cgroup controller is
          enabled in the kernel. The general benefit of these changes
          should be a more robust and safer system, that provides a
          certain amount of per-service fork() bomb protection.

        * systemd-nspawn gained the new --network-veth-extra= switch
          to define additional and arbitrarily-named virtual Ethernet
          links between the host and the container.

        * A new service execution setting PassEnvironment= has been
          added that allows importing select environment variables
          from PID1's environment block into the environment block of
          the service.

        * systemd will now bump the net.unix.max_dgram_qlen to 512 by
          default now (the kernel default is 16). This is beneficial
          for avoiding blocking on AF_UNIX/SOCK_DGRAM sockets since it
          allows substantially larger numbers of queued
          datagrams. This should increase the capability of systemd to
          parallelize boot-up, as logging and sd_notify() are unlikely
          to stall execution anymore. If you need to change the value
          from the new defaults, use the usual sysctl.d/ snippets.

        * The compression framing format used by the journal or
          coredump processing has changed to be in line with what the
          official LZ4 tools generate. LZ4 compression support in
          systemd was considered unsupported previously, as the format
          was not compatible with the normal tools. With this release
          this has changed now, and it is hence safe for downstream
          distributions to turn it on. While not compressing as well
          as the XZ, LZ4 is substantially faster, which makes
          it a good default choice for the compression logic in the
          journal and in coredump handling.

        * Any reference to /etc/mtab has been dropped from
          systemd. The file has been obsolete since a while, but
          systemd refused to work on systems where it was incorrectly
          set up (it should be a symlink or non-existent). Please make
          sure to update to util-linux 2.27.1 or newer in conjunction
          with this systemd release, which also drops any reference to
          /etc/mtab. If you maintain a distribution make sure that no
          software you package still references it, as this is a
          likely source of bugs. There's also a glibc bug pending,
          asking for removal of any reference to this obsolete file:

          https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=19108

        * Support for the ".snapshot" unit type has been removed. This
          feature turned out to be little useful and little used, and
          has now been removed from the core and from systemctl.

        * The dependency types RequiresOverridable= and
          RequisiteOverridable= have been removed from systemd. They
          have been used only very sparingly to our knowledge and
          other options that provide a similar effect (such as
          systemctl --mode=ignore-dependencies) are much more useful
          and commonly used. Moreover, they were only half-way
          implemented as the option to control behaviour regarding
          these dependencies was never added to systemctl. By removing
          these dependency types the execution engine becomes a bit
          simpler. Unit files that use these dependencies should be
          changed to use the non-Overridable dependency types
          instead. In fact, when parsing unit files with these
          options, that's what systemd will automatically convert them
          too, but it will also warn, asking users to fix the unit
          files accordingly. Removal of these dependency types should
          only affect a negligible number of unit files in the wild.

        * Behaviour of networkd's IPForward= option changed
          (again). It will no longer maintain a per-interface setting,
          but propagate one way from interfaces where this is enabled
          to the global kernel setting. The global setting will be
          enabled when requested by a network that is set up, but
          never be disabled again. This change was made to make sure
          IPv4 and IPv6 behaviour regarding packet forwarding is
          similar (as the Linux IPv6 stack does not support
          per-interface control of this setting) and to minimize
          surprises.

        * In unit files the behaviour of %u, %U, %h, %s has
          changed. These specifiers will now unconditionally resolve
          to the various user database fields of the user that the
          systemd instance is running as, instead of the user
          configured in the specific unit via User=. Note that this
          effectively doesn't change much, as resolving of these
          specifiers was already turned off in the --system instance
          of systemd, as we cannot do NSS lookups from PID 1. In the
          --user instance of systemd these specifiers where correctly
          resolved, but hardly made any sense, since the user instance
          lacks privileges to do user switches anyway, and User= is
          hence useless. Morever, even in the --user instance of
          systemd behaviour was awkward as it would only take settings
          from User= assignment placed before the specifier into
          account. In order to unify and simplify the logic around
          this the specifiers will now always resolve to the
          credentials of the user invoking the manager (which in case
          of PID 1 is the root user).

        Contributions from: Andrew Jones, Beniamino Galvani, Boyuan
        Yang, Daniel Machon, Daniel Mack, David Herrmann, David
        Reynolds, David Strauss, Dongsu Park, Evgeny Vereshchagin,
        Felipe Sateler, Filipe Brandenburger, Franck Bui, Hristo
        Venev, Iago López Galeiras, Jan Engelhardt, Jan Janssen, Jan
        Synacek, Jesus Ornelas Aguayo, Karel Zak, kayrus, Kay Sievers,
        Lennart Poettering, Liu Yuan Yuan, Mantas Mikulėnas, Marcel
        Holtmann, Marcin Bachry, Marcos Alano, Marcos Mello, Mark
        Theunissen, Martin Pitt, Michael Marineau, Michael Olbrich,
        Michal Schmidt, Michal Sekletar, Mirco Tischler, Nick Owens,
        Nicolas Cornu, Patrik Flykt, Peter Hutterer, reverendhomer,
        Ronny Chevalier, Sangjung Woo, Seong-ho Cho, Shawn Landden,
        Susant Sahani, Thomas Haller, Thomas Hindoe Paaboel Andersen,
        Tom Gundersen, Torstein Husebø, Vito Caputo, Zbigniew
        Jędrzejewski-Szmek

        -- Berlin, 2015-11-18