Systemd 221 Fixes Bugs, Wants Distributions To Start Shipping KDBUS

One month after the huge systemd 220 update, systemd 221 is out and primarily geared for fixing bugs.

Lennart Poettering announced the systemd 221 release this morning as a bug-fix release. In addition, systemd 221 now makes sd-bus.h and sd-event.h public and makes KDBUS support no longer optional. KDBUS support is now always built-in rather than offering a compile-time option. KDBUS support can be disabled at runtime if passing the kdbus=0 option to the kernel command-line.

KDBUS as the new in-kernel IPC mechanism remains not yet mainlined as of Linux 4.1. It's not yet clear whether KDBUS will be accepted for the Linux 4.2 kernel, but systemd developers suggest, "We encourage all downstream distributions to begin testing kdbus by adding it to the kernel images in the development distributions, and leaving kdbus support in systemd enabled."

More details on the systemd 221 changes via the release announcement.