systemd 248 RC3 Released With Extension Images Support, New Security Capabilities

[phoronix]

Phoronix: systemd 248 RC3 Released With Extension Images Support, New Security Capabilities

It looks like the official release of systemd 248 is quite imminent but for now a third release candidate has been issued to help facilitate last minute testing...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=systemd-248-rc3

[Hans Bull]

Let's hope that support for unlocking LUKS2 volumes will trickle down to popular distro installers ASAP.

[skeevy420]

Hans Bull Yep. System-wide LUKS2 depends on a new GRUB release more than anything. While GRUB finally has support for it, it just hasn't had an official update in a good, long while (since 2019 is a long while in PC terms). GRUB is basically mandatory because it's the only mainstream bootloader that works on legacy and modern x86_64 systems.

It sucks that distributions seem to be picking x86_64_v2 as the cutoff line. That basically forces GRUB on us all for indefinitely since v2 includes pre-EFI systems. As far as I can tell the only other option is Clover, the Hackintosh bootloader, since it emulates EFI on legacy systems which allows using modern bootloaders anywhere.

[scottishduck]

Would be very nice if distros could make systemd-boot the default on EFI systems, or at least make it an option. It’s so much better than GRUB.

[caligula]

Hans Bull Yep. System-wide LUKS2 depends on a new GRUB release more than anything. While GRUB finally has support for it, it just hasn't had an official update in a good, long while (since 2019 is a long while in PC terms). GRUB is basically mandatory because it's the only mainstream bootloader that works on legacy and modern x86_64 systems.

Doesn't SYSLINUX also run on both systems?

[CommunityMember]

While GRUB finally has support for it, it just hasn't had an official update in a good, long while

grub 2.0.6-rc1 was made available just today. So maybe it will happen soon, as was referenced in https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...x=GRUB-In-2021

[locore]

Would be very nice if distros could make systemd-boot the default on EFI systems, or at least make it an option. It’s so much better than GRUB.

I've been using this for a couple years now and absolutely love it. But I double this will ever be the default on any of the mainstream distros.

[skeevy420]

grub 2.0.6-rc1 was made available just today. So maybe it will happen soon, as was referenced in https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...x=GRUB-In-2021

ROFL. That's hilarious. The first anything to be released in almost two years would happen right after a "damn why they takin so long" rant

caligula Quick reading shows that yeah it does support both, but it's also missing lots of file system features...like way worse than GRUB. No BTRFS compression at all for starters. Could probably work around most all of them with an initramfs off a fat32 /efi or /boot

[F.Ultra]

Would be very nice if distros could make systemd-boot the default on EFI systems, or at least make it an option. It’s so much better than GRUB.

My main problem with systemd-boot (and thus gummiboot) is that AFAIK (atleast according to all guides) it requires the kernels to be stored on the EFI partition and #1 my EFI is super small since it's only used for the small shim for grub2, #2 I don't like having files on stupid FAT32 and #3 apt refuses to write to FAT-partitions so one have to have magic scripts copying the kernels around after each update (and thus store the kernels twice).

[lowflyer]

the "248" in the name stands for the number of features packed into systemd