The systemd software has been greatly improved

Feb 17, 2015 09:40 GMT  ·  By

Lennart Poettering, the creator of systemd, has announced the immediate availability of systemd 219, a release that includes numerous improvements, specifically for Btrfs hookup, networkd, and containers. Many bugs have also been fixed in this release.

According to the release notes, systemd 219 introduces a new API (Application Programming Interface) called "sd-hwdb.h" and designed to be used for querying and enumerating udev hwdb, the hardware metadata database. In addition, the systemd-hwdb tool has been added to the interface.

It adds new functions for the Btrfs file system

The --ephemeral parameter has been added to the systemd-nspawn tool. Specifically designed to be used only with the Btrfs file systems, the new parameter helps you to take snapshots of the container's root directory. It can also be used for starting a container off the root filesystem of the respective host operating system, without affecting it.

In addition, the systemd-nspawn tool received another parameters, --template=, which can be used to instantiate containers dynamically by taking the path to a container tree and use it as a template for the specified tree. Once again, this only works on Btrfs file systems.

Introduces numerous new commands and fixes many annoying bugs

systemd is now capable of distinguishing unsupported and supported unit types, fixes an unmounting issue with stacked mount points, the “copy-to” and “copy-from” commands have been added to the machinectl tool, which also received a “bind” command for binding mount host directories into local containers.

Among other features, we can mention support for configuring bridge forwarding database entries with networkd, the addition of the systemd-importd daemon for downloading container images, support for listing and cloning container images using machinectl, as well as support for configuring IPv6 link-local addressing with networkd.

While there are many systemd haters out there, one can download systemd 219 right now from Softpedia. “Note that this version is not available in Fedora F22/F23 yet. The linker on ARM segfaults. Since the i386 and x86_64 versions built fine, I decided to release 219 anyway,” said Lennart Poettering in the mailing list release announcement.