[systemd-devel] [ANNOUNCE] systemd v229

[Lennart Poettering]

Heya!

I just tagged the v229 release of systemd. Enjoy!

CHANGES WITH 229:

        * The systemd-resolved DNS resolver service has gained a substantial
          set of new features, most prominently it may now act as a DNSSEC
          validating stub resolver. DNSSEC mode is currently turned off by
          default, but it is expected that this is turned on by default in one
          of the next releases. For now, we invite everybody to test the DNSSEC
          logic by setting DNSSEC=allow-downgrade in
          /etc/systemd/resolved.conf. The service also gained a full set of
          D-Bus interfaces, including calls to configure DNS and DNSSEC
          settings per link (for consumption by external network management
          software). systemd-resolved (and systemd-networkd along with it) now
          know to distinguish between "search" and "routing" domains. The
          former are used to qualify single-label names, the latter are purely
          used for routing lookups within certain domains to specific
          links. resolved will now also synthesize RRs for all entries from
          /etc/hosts.

        * The systemd-resolve tool (which is a client utility for
          systemd-resolved, and previously experimental) has been improved
          considerably and is now fully supported and documented. Hence it has
          moved from /usr/lib/systemd to /usr/bin.

        * /dev/disk/by-path/ symlink support has been (re-)added for virtio
          devices.

        * The coredump collection logic has been reworked: when a coredump is
          collected it is now written to disk, compressed and processed
          (including stacktrace extraction) from a new instantiated service
          systemd-coredump at .service, instead of directly from the
          /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern hook we provide. This is beneficial as
          processing large coredumps can take up a substantial amount of
          resources and time, and this previously happened entirely outside of
          systemd's service supervision. With the new logic the core_pattern
          hook only does minimal metadata collection before passing off control
          to the new instantiated service, which is configured with a time
          limit, a nice level and other settings to minimize negative impact on
          the rest of the system. Also note that the new logic will honour the
          RLIMIT_CORE setting of the crashed process, which now allows users
          and processes to turn off coredumping for their processes by setting
          this limit.

        * The RLIMIT_CORE resource limit now defaults to "unlimited" for PID 1
          and all forked processes by default. Previously, PID 1 would leave
          the setting at "0" for all processes, as set by the kernel. Note that
          the resource limit traditionally has no effect on the generated
          coredumps on the system if the /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern hook
          logic is used. Since the limit is now honoured (see above) its
          default has been changed so that the coredumping logic is enabled by
          default for all processes, while allowing specific opt-out.

        * When the stacktrace is extracted from processes of system users, this
          is now done as "systemd-coredump" user, in order to sandbox this
          potentially security sensitive parsing operation. (Note that when
          processing coredumps of normal users this is done under the user ID
          of process that crashed, as before.) Packagers should take notice
          that it is now necessary to create the "systemd-coredump" system user
          and group at package installation time.

        * The systemd-activate socket activation testing tool gained support
          for SOCK_DGRAM and SOCK_SEQPACKET sockets using the new --datagram
          and --seqpacket switches. It also has been extended to support both
          new-style and inetd-style file descriptor passing. Use the new
          --inetd switch to request inetd-style file descriptor passing.

        * Most systemd tools now honor a new $SYSTEMD_COLORS environment
          variable, which takes a boolean value. If set to false, ANSI color
          output is disabled in the tools even when run on a terminal that
          supports it.

        * The VXLAN support in networkd now supports two new settings
          DestinationPort= and PortRange=.

        * A new systemd.machine_id= kernel command line switch has been added,
          that may be used to set the machine ID in /etc/machine-id if it is
          not initialized yet. This command line option has no effect if the
          file is already initialized.

        * systemd-nspawn gained a new --as-pid2 switch that invokes any
          specified command line as PID 2 rather than PID 1 in the
          container. In this mode PID 1 will be a minimal stub init process
          that implements the special POSIX and Linux semantics of PID 1
          regarding signal and child process management. Note that this stub
          init process is implemented in nspawn itself and requires no support
          from the container image. This new logic is useful to support running
          arbitrary command lines in the container, as normal processes are
          generally not prepared to run as PID 1.

        * systemd-nspawn gained a new --chdir= switch for setting the current
          working directory for the process started in the container.

        * "journalctl /dev/sda" will now output all kernel log messages from
          the specified device, in addition to all devices that are parents of
          it. This should make log output about devices pretty useful, as long
          as kernel drivers attach enough metadata to the log messages. (The
          usual SATA drivers do.)

        * The sd-journal API gained two new calls
          sd_journal_has_runtime_files() and sd_journal_has_persistent_files()
          that report whether log data from /run or /var has been found.

        * journalctl gained a new switch "--fields" that prints all journal
          record field names currently in use in the journal.  This is backed
          by two new sd-journal API calls sd_journal_enumerate_fields() and
          sd_journal_restart_fields().

        * Most configurable timeouts in systemd now expect an argument of
          "infinity" to turn them off, instead of "0" as before. The semantics
          from now on is that a timeout of "0" means "now", and "infinity"
          means "never". To maintain backwards compatibility, "0" continues to
          turn off previously existing timeout settings.

        * "systemctl reload-or-try-restart" has been renamed to "systemctl
          try-reload-or-restart" to clarify what it actually does: the "try"
          logic applies to both reloading and restarting, not just restarting.
          The old name continues to be accepted for compatibility.

        * On boot-up, when PID 1 detects that the system clock is behind the
          release date of the systemd version in use, the clock is now set
          to the latter. Previously, this was already done in timesyncd, in order
          to avoid running with clocks set to the various clock epochs such as
          1902, 1938 or 1970. With this change the logic is now done in PID 1
          in addition to timesyncd during early boot-up, so that it is enforced
          before the first process is spawned by systemd. Note that the logic
          in timesyncd remains, as it is more comprehensive and ensures
          montonic clocks by maintaining a persistant timestamp file in
          /var. Since /var is generally not available in earliest boot or the
          initrd, this part of the logic remains in timesyncd, and is not done
          by PID 1.

        * Support for tweaking details in net_cls.class_id through the
          NetClass= configuration directive has been removed, as the kernel
          people have decided to deprecate that controller in cgroup v2.
          Userspace tools such as nftables are moving over to setting rules
          that are specific to the full cgroup path of a task, which obsoletes
          these controllers anyway. The NetClass= directive is kept around for
          legacy compatibility reasons. For a more in-depth description of the
          kernel change, please refer to the respective upstream commit:

            https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=bd1060a1d671

        * A new service setting RuntimeMaxSec= has been added that may be used
          to specify a maximum runtime for a service. If the timeout is hit, the
          service is terminated and put into a failure state.

        * A new service setting AmbientCapabilities= has been added. It allows
          configuration of additional Linux process capabilities that are
          passed to the activated processes. This is only available on very
          recent kernels.

        * The process resource limit settings in service units may now be used
          to configure hard and soft limits individually.

        * The various libsystemd APIs such as sd-bus or sd-event now publicly
          expose support for gcc's __attribute__((cleanup())) C
          extension. Specifically, for many object destructor functions
          alternative versions whose names are suffixed with "p" have been
          added, which take a pointer to a pointer to the object to destroy,
          instead of just a pointer to the object itself. This is useful because
          these destructor functions may be used directly as parameters to the
          cleanup construct. Internally, systemd has been a heavy user of the
          GCC extension since a long time, and with this change similar support
          is now available to consumers of the library outside of systemd. Note
          that by using this extension in your sources compatibility with old
          and strictly ANSI compatible C compilers is lost. However, any gcc or
          LLVM version of recent years have supported this extension.

        * Timer units gained support for a new setting RandomizedDelaySec= that
          allows configuring some additional randomized delay to the configured
          time. This is useful to spread out timer events to avoid load peaks in
          clusters or larger setups.

        * Calendar time specifications now support sub-second accuracy.

        * Socket units now support listening on SCTP and UDP-lite protocol
          sockets.

        * The sd-event API now comes with a full set of man pages.

        * Older versions of systemd contained experimental support for
          compressing journal files and coredumps with the LZ4 compressor that
          was not compatible with the lz4 binary (due to API limitations of the
          lz4 library). This support has been removed; only support for files
          compatible with the lz4 binary remains. This LZ4 logic is now
          officially supported and no longer considered experimental.

        * The dkr image import logic has been removed again from importd. dkr's
          micro-services focus doesn't fit into the machine image focus of
          importd, and quickly got out of date with the upstream dkr API.

        * Creation of the /run/lock/lockdev/ directory was dropped from
          tmpfiles.d/legacy.conf. Better locking mechanisms like flock() have
          been available for many years. If you still need this, you need to
          create your own tmpfiles.d config file with:

                  d /run/lock/lockdev 0775 root lock -

        Contributions from: Abdo Roig-Maranges, Alban Crequy, Aleksander
        Adamowski, Alexander Kuleshov, Andreas Pokorny, Andrei Borzenkov,
        Andrew Wilcox, Arthur Clement, Beniamino Galvani, Casey Schaufler,
        Chris Atkinson, Chris Mayo, Christian Hesse, Damjan Georgievski, Dan
        Dedrick, Daniele Medri, Daniel J Walsh, Daniel Korostil, Daniel Mack,
        David Herrmann, Dimitri John Ledkov, Dominik Hannen, Douglas Christman,
        Evgeny Vereshchagin, Filipe Brandenburger, Franck Bui, Gabor Kelemen,
        Harald Hoyer, Hayden Walles, Helmut Grohne, Henrik Kaare Poulsen,
        Hristo Venev, Hui Wang, Indrajit Raychaudhuri, Ismo Puustinen, Jakub
        Wilk, Jan Alexander Steffens (heftig), Jan Engelhardt, Jan Synacek,
        Joost Bremmer, Jorgen Schaefer, Karel Zak, Klearchos Chaloulos,
        lc85446, Lennart Poettering, Lukas Nykryn, Mantas Mikulėnas, Marcel
        Holtmann, Martin Pitt, Michael Biebl, Michael Olbrich, Michael Scherer,
        Michał Górny, Michal Sekletar, Nicolas Cornu, Nicolas Iooss, Nils
        Carlson, nmartensen, nnz1024, Patrick Ohly, Peter Hutterer, Phillip Sz,
        Ronny Chevalier, Samu Kallio, Shawn Landden, Stef Walter, Susant
        Sahani, Sylvain Plantefève, Tadej Janež, Thomas Hindoe Paaboel
        Andersen, Tom Gundersen, Torstein Husebø, Umut Tezduyar Lindskog, Vito
        Caputo, WaLyong Cho, Yu Watanabe, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek

        -- Berlin, 2016-02-11

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering, Red Hat