As what might be its last test release before declaring the stable release, systemd 258-rc4 was released this week as the latest stepping stone for this dominant Linux init system and service manager.
Systemd 258 has been baking all of this year and is shipping 260+ changes with a number of new tools like systemd-factory-reset, systemd-pty-forward, and numerous other feature additions across its massive arsenal of system tools. Systemd 258 has continued tacking on new features and preparing to raise Linux system requirements.
With systemd 258-rc4 it incorporates a few more fixes and minor alterations with nearing the point of declaring the stable release milestone. There are though a few NEWS file changes made since the prior release candidate worth calling out:
* Support for the legacy /run/lock/ directory is deprecated and will be removed in v259. Any software that still needs access to this legacy directory is encouraged to ship their own tmpfiles.d configuration to set it up according to their needs. In general, services should store their lock files in RuntimeDirectory=/$RUNTIME_DIRECTORY, and software directly executed by users should use $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR.
* ACLs for device nodes requested by “uaccess” udev tag are now always applied/updated by systemd-udevd through “uaccess” udev builtin, and systemd-logind no longer applies/updates ACLs but triggers “change” uevents to make systemd-udevd apply/update ACLs. Hence, the “uaccess” udev tag should be set not only on “add” action but also on “change” action, and it is highly recommended that the rule is applied all actions except for “remove” action.
Recommended example:
ACTION!=”remove”, SUBSYSTEM==”hidraw”, TAG+=”uaccess”
The following example does not work since v258:
ACTION==”add”, SUBSYSTEM==”hidraw”, TAG+=”uaccess”* systemd-stub v258 requires ukify v257.9 or v258 or newer when building a UKI. Due to an incompatible change necessary in order to fix a bug related to embedding a .sbat section larger than 512 bytes, ukify v257.8 or older will not be able to use systemd-stub v258 or newer.
Those are the only prominent NEWS updates with systemd 258-rc4.
For the full list of changes or to help in testing this near-final systemd 258 release can be done via GitHub.