Systemd 205 Presents "Major New Concepts"

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Systemd 205 Presents "Major New Concepts"

Lennart Poettering released systemd 205 on Wednesday and with the new release comes some very significant changes...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTQwMjQ

[madjr]

ok, so in english what good will all this be for ?

[Ericg]

The highlights

There's big changes happening in kernel as far as tracking and grouping processes (cgroups), systemd is just adapting to those changes.

Release announcement also mentions adding new unit types, and logind now supports and handles one of those types--slices. This lets an admin say that "User X can never use more than XYZ% of resources" or the likes.

Release announcement also talks about the new "systemd-run" command, it sounds like its basically the same as just running the command from terminal, the upside is that if you do it with systemd-run it automatically adds and registers a service file so that you can track it through systemctl.

Journalctl can now filter kernel messages if you do "-k" which is basically dmesg, but again its just about consolidating things and comamnds into one place for simplicity.

Those are the things that caught my eye as far as end-users go. The others are mostly for developers / unit file authors

[GreatEmerald]

There's also a new switch to easily change the default target to boot into.

Overall very nice. The slice unit files allow for starting processes owned by non-init, which means that they can be seen as a group (and so automatically combined in a cgroup, started and killed together etc.). That sounds very useful.

By the way, I'm a bit outdated on this, but how is the support for starting X without a dedicated login manager going along? Last time I tried it, it was still messy.