An Update On The SystemD System & Session Manager

There's an update on systemd by Lennart Poettering, the Berlin developer that created this project to serve as a new system and session manager for Linux. The systemd manager is compatible with existing SysV and LSB init scripts while it leverages D-Bus activation, heavily supports parallelization, and has many other features that makes it of interest to distribution vendors and end-users. Red Hat has already switched from SysVinit to systemd with Fedora 14 and judging from Lennart's blog post today it will likely gain more acceptance based upon the recent improvements.

Some of the systemd updates talked about in this blog post include support for SELinux, hooking up systemd to the Linux auditing system, support for TCP wrappers and PAM, Debian and openSUSE extensions support for SysVinit, a new systemd-cgls module, the systemctl command has gained many new features, a fairly complete set of documentation has been written, and various other small fixes and enhancements have been made to this young but promising free software project.

Lennart has also written a second blog post today that provides systemd documentation for system administrators and that can be found here. This is the first systemd administration post as part of a series.

While Red Hat is already using Fedora 14 by default, optional systemd packages are also available for openSUSE, Debian, Gentoo, and Arch Linux. Links for these packages can be found at FreeDesktop.org.