Lennart: The State & Future Of Systemd

Written by Michael Larabel in systemd on 5 July 2014 at 12:46 AM EDT. 106 Comments
SYSTEMD
Lennart Poettering gave a talk recently in Beijing about the state of systemd and its future ahead.

Lennart keynoted at the joint FUDCon Beijing 2014 with GNOME.Asia 2014 event and he talked about the current position of systemd and its future going forward, while acknowledging it's evolved more than just being a basic init system to being "a set of basic building blocks to build an OS from."

Among the expressed objectives of systemd are turning Linux from "a bag of bits into a competitive general purpose operating system", building the Internet's Next Generation OS, unifying "pointless differences" between distributions, and causing greater innovation within the core OS. Systemd developers want to reduce administrator complexity, make everything introspectable, provide auto-discovery and plug and play, and fix things when they are broken. (Their fixing comments are interesting given the kernel developers being fed up with systemd and the issues that have come about.)

The tasks mentioned that systemd already covers include, "init system, journal logging, login management, device management, temporary and volatile file management, binary format registration, backlight save/restore, rfkill save/restore, bootchart, readahead, encrypted storage setup, EFI/GPT partition discovery, virtual machine/container registration, minimal container management, hostname management, locale management, time management, random seed management, sysctl variable management, and console managment."

Tasks being worked on are support for a local DNS cache, mDNS responder, LLMNR responder, DNSSEC verification, IPC support in the kernel (KDBUS), time synchronization with NTP, better integration with containers, and many other services.

All of Lennart's slides in full can be found in PDF form.
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