The first release candidate of systemd 260 is now available for testing. Systemd 260 finally does away with System V service scripts support. Also notable to systemd 260 is the work around the new “mstack” feature.
Systemd 260-rc1 was just released and some of the most interesting highlights of this new version include:
– Support for System V service scripts has been removed. This has long been deprecated and known to be coming down the pipe while now it’s finally here. System V service scripts are no longer supported and now you must be relying on native systemd unit files.
– A new systemd-mstack command line tool has been added for dealing with the new mstack feature interactively. The new “mstack” feature allows for defining an OverlayFS by structuring the contents of a “.mstack/” directory following the specification. More details on systemd’s mstack within the pull request for importd: add support for downloading OCI images for expanding systemd’s containerization and sandboxing capabilities.
– The minimum Linux kernel version supported by systemd 260 is also bumped from Linux 5.4 to Linux 5.10 while recommending ideally at least Linux 5.14 or Linux 6.6 for full functionality.
– Systemd 260 introduces the new FANCY_NAME= field for os-release. The FANCY_NAME field is similar to the existing “PRETTY_NAME” but can contain ANSI sequences such as Unicode emojis. The FANCY_NAME in turn will be shown by the systemd manager, systemd-hostnamed, and hostnamectl.
– systemd-networkd now gains integration with ModemManager via the “simple connect” protocol.
– systemd-repart now supports basic integrity checks of encrypted volumes,
– systemd-portabled now runs as a user service with unprivileged users now being able to run portable services on recent versions of the Linux kernel.
– Continued the expandive use of Varlink use throughout systemd.
More details on today’s systemd 260-rc1 release via GitHub.
