[systemd-devel] [ANNOUNCE] systemd v28

[Lennart Poettering]

Heya,

http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/systemd-28.tar.bz2

The biggest change is that we no longer install the hwclock services. Details on this:

Instead of relying on "hwclock --hctosys" to deal with RTCs in local
clocks we now do this internally in PID 1. This is much faster, simpler
and shorter on one hand (i.e. one magic settimeofday() call, that's
all), but also more correct: we actually pass the timezone delta to the
kernel instead of reading, shifting and writing the clock. i.e. we use
the right API here -- which hwclock doesn't use. It also has the benefit
that we can always rely on a valid clock and do not have to sync
services against hwclock-load.service, because systemd fixes the clock
as one of the very first things it does.

At shutdown we no longer invoke "hwclock --systohc", i.e. do not write
the system clock back to the RTC. Why? In general there's not really a
reason to assume that the system clock was anymore correct than the RTC
so it's probably a good idea to leave the RTC untouched. The only time
when the system clock is probably very reliable is when NTP is used, but
in that case the kernel syncs the system clock to the RTC clock anyway
every 11 minutes, hence doing this in userspace is pointless. And if the
user changes the system clock manually it's his duty to sync that
through to the RTC, and if he doesn't then he probably has a reason
to. (a future clock mechanism bus service shipped along systemd of
course will sync the clock in such a case through to RTC). Applying the
time to RTC instantly instead of delaying that to shutdown also makes
sure the time change is not lost if this system is suddenly turned off.

This should make things a lot simpler for stateless systems, or livecds,
since the RTC is never touched by default.

systemd will read the 3rd line of /etc/adjtime to figure our whether the
RTC is in UTC or LOCAL, as always, hence this change should be fully
compatible. However, embedded setups (and in fact all distros by
default) should not ship /etc/adjtime at all, which means UTC RTC.

There's one thing hwclock does that is lost this way: the automatic RTC
systematic drift detection and adjustment it does at boot. But that's a
very questionnable feature anyway and breaks horribly in multi-boot
setups. The new scheme will not do drifting by default anymore, but that
doesn't mean people who are into this kind of stuff couldn't still
enable it. For example they you could steal the old units from git and
then make them optionally installable. (Maybe you can even convince
Karel to ship them along u-l.). However, I think this stuff should
really be an option, not the default. And honestly, if you want correct
time, use NTP and only NTP, don't use hacks like drift detection. After
all to make the drift detection work correctly you need NTP as reliable
time base to compare against anyway, so why bother?

So yupp, the interaction with the RTC is very simple now:

a) the kernel reads the RTC and sets the system clock to it, assuming UTC
b) as first thing systemd applies the timezone shift -- if it finds the RTC
   configured for LOCAL in /etc/adjtime
c) When NTP is used the kernel syncs the system clock down to the RTC
   every 11 min
d) When the user configures the system clock manually this should be
   synced down to the RTC right away, also manually.

Shortlog:

Harald Hoyer (1):
      readahead-collect: ignore EACCES for fanotify

Kay Sievers (10):
      missing: add IP_TRANSPARENT
      sd-daemon: move _sd_hidden_ from .h to .c file
      socket: always use SO_{RCV,SND}BUFFORCE to allow larger values
      bus_property_append_long: use signed long and 'x' in the signature for DBUS_TYPE_INT64
      update TODO
      update TODO
      rtc in localtime: use settimeofday(NULL, tz) instead of hwclock(8)
      update TODO
      drop hwclock-save.service
      sd-daemon: remove superfluous _sd_hidden_ from static function

Lennart Poettering (4):
      util: use new VT ESC sequence to clear scrollback buffer
      socket: expose mq params in introspection data
      readahead: explain that it is safe to ignore EACCES
      build-sys: prepare v28

Michal Schmidt (1):
      dbus-common: fix segfault when a DBus message has no interface

William Swanson (1):
      man: update the list of unit search locations

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.