Last week marked the release of systemd 260-rc1 with a new “mstack” feature, a new “FANCY_NAME” field for os-release, dropping System V service script support, and other changes. Out today is systemd 260-rc2 release with more changes in further working its way toward a stable release for empowering 2026 Linux distributions.
When going through the NEWS diff from systemd 260-rc1 to 260-rc2, some of the additions in today’s version include:
– Clarifying that the new “FANCY_NAME” field in os-release may contain non-ASCII Unicode glyphs. Previously it wasn’t explicit that the Unicode glyphs must be non-ASCII.
– systemctl gained a new “enqueue-marked” verb that calls the EnqueueMarkedJobs() D-Bus method.
– The CPUSchedulingPolicy= service now allows setting a value of “ext” for enabling the SCHED_EXT scheduler.
– A new MemoryTHP= service setting has been added to control per-service Transparent Huge Pages (THP) support.
– A new udev built-in “tpm2_id” is now available to extract vendor/model identification from connected TPM2 devices as they are probed.
– For systemd-networkd the .link files now support ScatterGather=, ScatterGatherFragmentList=, TCPECNSegmentationOffload=, TCPMangleIdSegmentationOffload=, GenericReceiveOffloadList=, GenericReceiveOffloadUDPForwarding= options for configuring Ethernet devices.
– systemd-networkd’s Varlink and JSON interfaces will now report IP addresses as a human readable string in addition to the existing integer array reporting.
– systemd-vmspawn gained support for registering with systemd-machined in the user session. Systemd-vmspawn also now supports Ephemeral machines with the “–ephemeral” option.
– systemd-logind/systemd-udevd added support for the new “xaccess” concept for delegating access to specific devices to users with specially marked sessions.
Downloads and more details on all of the systemd 260 changes in full can be found via the release announcement on GitHub.
