NEWS

systemd System and Service Manager

CHANGES WITH 186:

        * Several tools now understand kernel command line arguments,
          which are only read when run in an initial RAM disk. They
          usually follow closely their normal counterparts, but are
          prefixed with rd.

        * There's a new tool to analyze the readahead files that are
          automatically generated at boot. Use:

          /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-readahead analyze /.readahead

        * We now provide an early debug shell on tty9 if this enabled. Use:

          systemctl enable debug-shell.service

        * All plymouth related units have been moved into the Plymouth
          package. Please make sure to upgrade your Plymouth version
          as well.

        * systemd-tmpfiles now supports getting passed the basename of
          a configuration file only, in which case it will look for it
          in all appropriate directories automatically.

        * udevadm info now takes a /dev or /sys path as argument, and
          does the right thing. Example:

          udevadm info /dev/sda
          udevadm info /sys/class/block/sda

        * systemctl now prints a warning if a unit is stopped but a
          unit that might trigger it continues to run. Example: a
          service is stopped but the socket that activates it is left
          running.

        * "systemctl status" will now mention if the log output was
          shortened due to rotation since a service has been started.

        * The journal API now exposes functions to determine the
          "cutoff" times due to rotation.

        * journald now understands SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2 for triggering
          immediately flushing of runtime logs to /var if possible,
          resp. for triggering immediate rotation of the journal
          files.

        * It is now considered an error if a service is attempted to
          be stopped that is not loaded.

        * XDG_RUNTIME_DIR now uses numeric UIDs instead of usernames.

        * systemd-analyze now supports Python 3

        * tmpfiles now supports cleaning up directories via aging
          where the first level dirs are always kept around but
          directories beneath it automatically aged. This is enabled
          by prefixing the age field with '~'.

        * Seat objects now expose CanGraphical, CanTTY properties
          which is required to deal with very fast bootups where the
          display manager might be running before the graphics drivers
          completed initialization.

        * Seat objects now expose a State property.

        * We now include RPM macros for service enabling/disabling
          based on the preset logic. We recommend RPM based
          distributions to make use of these macros if possible. This
          makes it simpler to reuse RPM spec files across
          distributions.

        * We now make sure that the collected systemd unit name is
          always valid when services log to the journal via
          STDOUT/STDERR.

        * There's a new man page kernel-command-line(7) detailing all
          command line options we understand.

        * The fstab generator may now be disabled at boot by passing
          fstab=0 on the kernel command line.

        * A new kernel command line option modules-load= is now understood
          to load a specific kernel module statically, early at boot.

        * Unit names specified on the systemctl command line are now
          automatically escaped as needed. Also, if file system or
          device paths are specified they are automatically turned
          into the appropriate mount or device unit names. Example:

          systemctl status /home
          systemctl status /dev/sda

        * The SysVConsole= configuration option has been removed from
          system.conf parsing.

        * The SysV search path is no longer exported on the D-Bus
          Manager object.

        * The Names= option is been removed from unit file parsing.

        * There's a new man page bootup(7) detailing the boot process.

        * Every unit and every generator we ship with systemd now
          comes with full documentation. The self-explanatory boot is
          complete.

        * A couple of services gained "systemd-" prefixes in their
          name if they wrap systemd code, rather than only external
          code. Among them fsck@.service which is now
          systemd-fsck@.service.

        * The HaveWatchdog property has been removed from the D-Bus
          Manager object.

        * systemd.confirm_spawn= on the kernel command line should now
          work sensibly.

        * There's a new man page crypttab(5) which details all options
          we actually understand.

        * systemd-nspawn gained a new --capability= switch to pass
          additional capabilities to the container.

        * timedated will now read known NTP implementation unit names
          from /usr/share/systemd/ntp-units.d/*.list,
          systemd-timedated-ntp.target has been removed.

        * journalctl gained a new switch "-b" that lists log data of
          the current boot only.

        * The notify socket is in the abstract namespace again, in
          order to support daemons which chroot() at start-up.

        * There is a new Storage= configuration option for journald
          which allows configuration of where log data should go. This
          also provides a way to disable journal logging entirely, so
          that data collected is only forwarded to the console, the
          kernel log buffer or another syslog implementation.

        * Many bugfixes and optimizations.

        Contributions from: Auke Kok, Colin Guthrie, Dave Reisner,
        David Strauss, Eelco Dolstra, Kay Sievers, Lennart Poettering,
        Lukas Nykryn, Michal Schmidt, Michal Sekletar, Paul Menzel,
        Shawn Landden, Tom Gundersen

CHANGES WITH 185:
        * "systemctl help <unit>" now shows the man page if one is
          available.

        * Several new man pages have been added.

        * MaxLevelStore=, MaxLevelSyslog=, MaxLevelKMsg=,
          MaxLevelConsole= can now be specified in
          journald.conf. These options allow reducing the amount of
          data stored on disk or forwarded by the log level.

        * TimerSlackNSec= can now be specified in system.conf for
          PID1. This allows system-wide power savings.

        Contributions from: Dave Reisner, Kay Sievers, Lauri Kasanen,
        Lennart Poettering, Malte Starostik, Marc-Antoine Perennou,
        Matthias Clasen

CHANGES WITH 184:
        * logind is now capable of (optionally) handling power and
          sleep keys as well as the lid switch.

        * journalctl now understands the syntax "journalctl
          /usr/bin/avahi-daemon" to get all log output of a specific
          daemon.

        * CapabilityBoundingSet= in system.conf now also influences
          the capability bound set of usermode helpers of the kernel.

        Contributions from: Daniel Drake, Daniel J. Walsh, Gert
        Michael Kulyk, Harald Hoyer, Jean Delvare, Kay Sievers,
        Lennart Poettering, Matthew Garrett, Matthias Clasen, Paul
        Menzel, Shawn Landden, Tero Roponen, Tom Gundersen

CHANGES WITH 183:
        * Note that we skipped 139 releases here in order to set the
          new version to something that is greater than both udev's
          and systemd's most recent version number.

        * udev: all udev sources are merged into the systemd source tree now.
          All future udev development will happen in the systemd tree. It
          is still fully supported to use the udev daemon and tools without
          systemd running, like in initramfs or other init systems. Building
          udev though, will require the *build* of the systemd tree, but
          udev can be properly *run* without systemd.

        * udev: /lib/udev/devices/ are not read anymore; systemd-tmpfiles
          should be used to create dead device nodes as workarounds for broken
          subsystems.

        * udev: RUN+="socket:..."  and udev_monitor_new_from_socket() is
          no longer supported. udev_monitor_new_from_netlink() needs to be
          used to subscribe to events.

        * udev: when udevd is started by systemd, processes which are left
          behind by forking them off of udev rules, are unconditionally cleaned
          up and killed now after the event handling has finished. Services or
          daemons must be started as systemd services. Services can be
          pulled-in by udev to get started, but they can no longer be directly
          forked by udev rules.

        * udev: the daemon binary is called systemd-udevd now and installed
          in /usr/lib/systemd/. Standalone builds or non-systemd systems need
          to adapt to that, create symlink, or rename the binary after building
          it.

        * libudev no longer provides these symbols:
            udev_monitor_from_socket()
            udev_queue_get_failed_list_entry()
            udev_get_{dev,sys,run}_path()
          The versions number was bumped and symbol versioning introduced.

        * systemd-loginctl and systemd-journalctl have been renamed
          to loginctl and journalctl to match systemctl.

        * The config files: /etc/systemd/systemd-logind.conf and
          /etc/systemd/systemd-journald.conf have been renamed to
          logind.conf and journald.conf. Package updates should rename
          the files to the new names on upgrade.

        * For almost all files the license is now LGPL2.1+, changed
          from the previous GPL2.0+. Exceptions are some minor stuff
          of udev (which will be changed to LGPL2.1 eventually, too),
          and the MIT licensed sd-daemon.[ch] library that is suitable
          to be used as drop-in files.

        * systemd and logind now handle system sleep states, in
          particular suspending and hibernating.

        * logind now implements a sleep/shutdown/idle inhibiting logic
          suitable for a variety of uses. Soonishly Lennart will blog
          about this in more detail.

        * var-run.mount and var-lock.mount are no longer provided
          (which prevously bind mounted these directories to their new
          places). Distributions which have not converted these
          directories to symlinks should consider stealing these files
          from git history and add them downstream.

        * We introduced the Documentation= field for units and added
          this to all our shipped units. This is useful to make it
          easier to explore the boot and the purpose of the various
          units.

        * All smaller setup units (such as
          systemd-vconsole-setup.service) now detect properly if they
          are run in a container and are skipped when
          appropriate. This guarantees an entirely noise-free boot in
          Linux container environments such as systemd-nspawn.

        * A framework for implementing offline system updates is now
          integrated, for details see:
          http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/SystemUpdates

        * A new service type Type=idle is available now which helps us
          avoiding ugly interleaving of getty output and boot status
          messages.

        * There's now a system-wide CapabilityBoundingSet= option to
          globally reduce the set of capabilities for the
          system. This is useful to drop CAP_SYS_MKNOD, CAP_SYS_RAWIO,
          CAP_NET_RAW, CAP_SYS_MODULE, CAP_SYS_TIME, CAP_SYS_PTRACE or
          even CAP_NET_ADMIN system-wide for secure systems.

        * There are now system-wide DefaultLimitXXX= options to
          globally change the defaults of the various resource limits
          for all units started by PID 1.

        * Harald Hoyer's systemd test suite has been integrated into
          systemd which allows easy testing of systemd builds in qemu
          and nspawn. (This is really awesome! Ask us for details!)

        * The fstab parser is now implemented as generator, not inside
          of PID 1 anymore.

        * systemctl will now warn you if .mount units generated from
          /etc/fstab are out of date due to changes in fstab that
          haven't been read by systemd yet.

        * systemd is now suitable for usage in initrds. Dracut has
          already been updated to make use of this. With this in place
          initrds get a slight bit faster but primarily are much
          easier to introspect and debug since "systemctl status" in
          the host system can be used to introspect initrd services,
          and the journal from the initrd is kept around too.

        * systemd-delta has been added, a tool to explore differences
          between user/admin configuration and vendor defaults.

        * PrivateTmp= now affects both /tmp and /var/tmp.

        * Boot time status messages are now much prettier and feature
          proper english language. Booting up systemd has never been
          so sexy.

        * Read-ahead pack files now include the inode number of all
          files to pre-cache. When the inode changes the pre-caching
          is not attempted. This should be nicer to deal with updated
          packages which might result in changes of read-ahead
          patterns.

        * We now temporaritly lower the kernel's read_ahead_kb variable
          when collecting read-ahead data to ensure the kernel's
          built-in read-ahead does not add noise to our measurements
          of necessary blocks to pre-cache.

        * There's now RequiresMountsFor= to add automatic dependencies
          for all mounts necessary for a specific file system path.

        * MountAuto= and SwapAuto= have been removed from
          system.conf. Mounting file systems at boot has to take place
          in systemd now.

        * nspawn now learned a new switch --uuid= to set the machine
          ID on the command line.

        * nspawn now learned the -b switch to automatically search
          for an init system.

        * vt102 is now the default TERM for serial TTYs, upgraded from
          vt100.

        * systemd-logind now works on VT-less systems.

        * The build tree has been reorganized. The individual
          components now have directories of their own.

        * A new condition type ConditionPathIsReadWrite= is now available.

        * nspawn learned the new -C switch to create cgroups for the
          container in other hierarchies.

        * We now have support for hardware watchdogs, configurable in
          system.conf.

        * The scheduled shutdown logic now has a public API.

        * We now mount /tmp as tmpfs by default, but this can be
          masked and /etc/fstab can override it.

        * Since udisks doesn't make use of /media anymore we are not
          mounting a tmpfs on it anymore.

        * journalctl gained a new --local switch to only interleave
          locally generated journal files.

        * We can now load the IMA policy at boot automatically.

        * The GTK tools have been split off into a systemd-ui.

        Contributions from: Andreas Schwab, Auke Kok, Ayan George,
        Colin Guthrie, Daniel Mack, Dave Reisner, David Ward, Elan
        Ruusamäe, Frederic Crozat, Gergely Nagy, Guillermo Vidal,
        Hannes Reinecke, Harald Hoyer, Javier Jardón, Kay Sievers,
        Lennart Poettering, Lucas De Marchi, Léo Gillot-Lamure,
        Marc-Antoine Perennou, Martin Pitt, Matthew Monaco, Maxim
        A. Mikityanskiy, Michael Biebl, Michael Olbrich, Michal
        Schmidt, Nis Martensen, Patrick McCarty, Roberto Sassu, Shawn
        Landden, Sjoerd Simons, Sven Anders, Tollef Fog Heen, Tom
        Gundersen

CHANGES WITH 44:
        * This is mostly a bugfix release

        * Support optional initialization of the machine ID from the
          KVM or container configured UUID.

        * Support immediate reboots with "systemctl reboot -ff"

        * Show /etc/os-release data in systemd-analyze output

        * Many bugfixes for the journal, including endianess fixes and
          ensuring that disk space enforcement works

        * sd-login.h is C++ comptaible again

        * Extend the /etc/os-release format on request of the Debian
          folks

        * We now refuse non-UTF8 strings used in various configuration
          and unit files. This is done to ensure we don't pass invalid
          data over D-Bus or expose it elsewhere.

        * Register Mimo USB Screens as suitable for automatic seat
          configuration

        * Read SELinux client context from journal clients in a race
          free fashion

        * Reorder configuration file lookup order. /etc now always
          overrides /run in order to allow the administrator to always
          and unconditionally override vendor supplied or
          automatically generated data.

        * The various user visible bits of the journal now have man
          pages. We still lack man pages for the journal API calls
          however.

        * We now ship all man pages in HTML format again in the
          tarball.

        Contributions from: Dave Reisner, Dirk Eibach, Frederic
        Crozat, Harald Hoyer, Kay Sievers, Lennart Poettering, Marti
        Raudsepp, Michal Schmidt, Shawn Landden, Tero Roponen, Thierry
        Reding

CHANGES WITH 43:
        * This is mostly a bugfix release

        * systems lacking /etc/os-release  are no longer supported.

        * Various functionality updates to libsystemd-login.so

        * Track class of PAM logins to distuingish greeters from
          normal user logins.

        Contributions from: Kay Sievers, Lennart Poettering, Michael
        Biebl

CHANGES WITH 42:
        * This is an important bugfix release for v41.

        * Building man pages is now optional which should be useful
          for those building systemd from git but unwilling to install
          xsltproc.

        * Watchdog support for supervising services is now usable. In
          a future release support for hardware watchdogs
          (i.e. /dev/watchdog) will be added building on this.

        * Service start rate limiting is now configurable and can be
          turned off per service. When a start rate limit is hit a
          reboot can automatically be triggered.

        * New CanReboot(), CanPowerOff() bus calls in systemd-logind.

        Contributions from: Benjamin Franzke, Bill Nottingham,
        Frederic Crozat, Lennart Poettering, Michael Olbrich, Michal
        Schmidt, Michał Górny, Piotr Drąg

CHANGES WITH 41:
        * The systemd binary is installed /usr/lib/systemd/systemd now;
          An existing /sbin/init symlink needs to be adapted with the
          package update.

        * The code that loads kernel modules has been ported to invoke
          libkmod directly, instead of modprobe. This means we do not
          support systems with module-init-tools anymore.

        * Watchdog support is now already useful, but still not
          complete.

        * A new kernel command line option systemd.setenv= is
          understood to set system wide environment variables
          dynamically at boot.

	* We now limit the set of capabilities of systemd-journald.

        * We now set SIGPIPE to ignore by default, since it only is
          useful in shell pipelines, and has little use in general
          code. This can be disabled with IgnoreSIPIPE=no in unit
          files.

        Contributions from: Benjamin Franzke, Kay Sievers, Lennart
        Poettering, Michael Olbrich, Michal Schmidt, Tom Gundersen,
        William Douglas

CHANGES WITH 40:
        * This is mostly a bugfix release

        * We now expose the reason why a service failed in the
          "Result" D-Bus property.

        * Rudimentary service watchdog support (will be completed over
          the next few releases.)

        * When systemd forks off in order execute some service we will
          now immediately changes its argv[0] to reflect which process
          it will execute. This is useful to minimize the time window
          with a generic argv[0], which makes bootcharts more useful

        Contributions from: Alvaro Soliverez, Chris Paulson-Ellis, Kay
        Sievers, Lennart Poettering, Michael Olbrich, Michal Schmidt,
        Mike Kazantsev, Ray Strode

CHANGES WITH 39:
        * This is mostly a test release, but incorporates many
          bugfixes.

        * New systemd-cgtop tool to show control groups by their
          resource usage.

        * Linking against libacl for ACLs is optional again. If
          disabled, support tracking device access for active logins
          goes becomes unavailable, and so does access to the user
          journals by the respective users.

        * If a group "adm" exists, journal files are automatically
          owned by them, thus allow members of this group full access
          to the system journal as well as all user journals.

        * The journal now stores the SELinux context of the logging
          client for all entries.

        * Add C++ inclusion guards to all public headers

        * New output mode "cat" in the journal to print only text
          messages, without any meta data like date or time.

        * Include tiny X server wrapper as a temporary stop-gap to
          teach XOrg udev display enumeration. This is used by display
          managers such as gdm, and will go away as soon as XOrg
          learned native udev hotplugging for display devices.

        * Add new systemd-cat tool for executing arbitrary programs
          with STDERR/STDOUT connected to the journal. Can also act as
          BSD logger replacement, and does so by default.

        * Optionally store all locally generated coredumps in the
          journal along with meta data.

        * systemd-tmpfiles learnt four new commands: n, L, c, b, for
          writing short strings to files (for usage for /sys), and for
          creating symlinks, character and block device nodes.

        * New unit file option ControlGroupPersistent= to make cgroups
          persistent, following the mechanisms outlined in
          http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/PaxControlGroups

        * Support multiple local RTCs in a sane way

        * No longer monopolize IO when replaying readahead data on
          rotating disks, since we might starve non-file-system IO to
          death, since fanotify() will not see accesses done by blkid,
          or fsck.

        * Don't show kernel threads in systemd-cgls anymore, unless
          requested with new -k switch.

        Contributions from: Dan Horák, Kay Sievers, Lennart
        Poettering, Michal Schmidt

CHANGES WITH 38:
        * This is mostly a test release, but incorporates many
          bugfixes.

        * The git repository moved to:
          git://anongit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd
          ssh://git.freedesktop.org/git/systemd/systemd

        * First release with the journal
          http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-journal.html

        * The journal replaces both systemd-kmsg-syslogd and
          systemd-stdout-bridge.

        * New sd_pid_get_unit() API call in libsystemd-logind

        * Many systemadm clean-ups

        * Introduce remote-fs-pre.target which is ordered before all
          remote mounts and may be used to start services before all
          remote mounts.

        * Added Mageia support

        * Add bash completion for systemd-loginctl

        * Actively monitor PID file creation for daemons which exit in
          the parent process before having finished writing the PID
          file in the daemon process. Daemons which do this need to be
          fixed (i.e. PID file creation must have finished before the
          parent exits), but we now react a bit more gracefully to them.

        * Add colourful boot output, mimicking the well-known output
          of existing distributions.

        * New option PassCredentials= for socket units, for
          compatibility with a recent kernel ABI breakage.

        * /etc/rc.local is now hooked in via a generator binary, and
          thus will no longer act as synchronization point during
          boot.

        * systemctl list-unit-files now supports --root=.

        * systemd-tmpfiles now understands two new commands: z, Z for
          relabelling files according to the SELinux database. This is
          useful to apply SELinux labels to specific files in /sys,
          among other things.

        * Output of SysV services is now forwarded to both the console
          and the journal by default, not only just the console.

        * New man pages for all APIs from libsystemd-login.

        * The build tree got reorganized and a the build system is a
          lot more modular allowing embedded setups to specifically
          select the components of systemd they are interested in.

        * Support for Linux systems lacking the kernel VT subsystem is
          restored.

        * configure's --with-rootdir= got renamed to
          --with-rootprefix= to follow the naming used by udev and
          kmod

        * Unless specified otherwise we'll now install to /usr instead
          of /usr/local by default.

        * Processes with '@' in argv[0][0] are now excluded from the
          final shut-down killing spree, following the logic explained
          in:
          http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/RootStorageDaemons

        * All processes remaining in a service cgroup when we enter
          the START or START_PRE states are now killed with
          SIGKILL. That means it is no longer possible to spawn
          background processes from ExecStart= lines (which was never
          supported anyway, and bad style).

        * New PropagateReloadTo=/PropagateReloadFrom= options to bind
          reloading of units together.

        Contributions from: Bill Nottingham, Daniel J. Walsh, Dave
        Reisner, Dexter Morgan, Gregs Gregs, Jonathan Nieder, Kay
        Sievers, Lennart Poettering, Michael Biebl, Michal Schmidt,
        Michał Górny, Ran Benita, Thomas Jarosch, Tim Waugh, Tollef
        Fog Heen, Tom Gundersen, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek