Systemd-homed Looks Like It Will Merged Soon For systemd 245

Announced back in September at the All Systems Go event in Berlin was systemd-homed as a new effort to improve home directory handling. Systemd-homed wants to make it easier to migrate home directories, ensure all user data is self-contained, unify user-password and encryption handling, and provide other modern takes on home/user directory functionality. That code is expected to soon land in systemd.

Systemd-homed was talked about by Lennart as being ready for versions 244 or 245. Now that systemd 244 shipped at the end of November, systemd-homed is looking like it will soon land in Git.

Lennart recently opened the pull request for adding systemd-homed. He wrote:

Yupp, as presented at AllSystemsGo! 2019, here it is! Should be pretty complete, with LUKS and fscrypt backends, with PKCS#11 yubikey unlocking, key suspending during system sleep, and lots and lots of other fancy features.

The code has been undergoing review by other upstream systemd developers and testing for the past two weeks. Some of the prep code has also been split out into separate PRs for helping to ease the review process and merge some of the more independent bits as ready.

So it looks like for systemd 245 in early 2020 will indeed be this all new systemd-homed functionality. Ideally we'll see systemd 245 in time for the likes of Fedora 32 and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. More details on some of the in-progress systemd-homed features can be found via the tentative documentation.