OpenBSD Made Progress On Their Systemd-Compatible Replacement

This summer a student developer began work on DBus daemons that accept systemd calls and emulated their behavior with their own native calls, in order to make drop-in replacements for BSD platforms where systemd is not supported and the upstream systemd developers have no plans of supporting.

This work revolved around writing effective BSD-compatible replacements for systemd-hostnamed, systemd-localed, systemd-timedated, and systemd-logind. While this work was spawned in the systemd camp, it's designed to run on Unix-like systems where systemd isn't supported (everything but Linux) in order to support the increasing number of end-user software packages depending upon systemd functionality, like GNOME. This Google Summer of Code work was done by student developer Ian Sutton with oversight from mentors Antoine Jacoutot and Landry Breuil.

While it's not clear right now how far these systemd utility replacements made it along, the code as of the end of the summer is hosted via the Google Melange site within the code sample section (unfortunately am not able to find any other blog posts or Git repositories for the work; will update if I receive any additional information). Hopefully this work will be picked up and continued by others not wishing to use/support systemd but still looking for compatibility with other systemd-dependent software.

Update: The Git repository for this code is here.