Systemd 240 Continues Picking Up New Features Ahead Of The Holidays

It's been over five months already since the release of systemd 239 and a lot of feature work has been amassing for what will end up releasing as systemd 240.

The news file for the in-development systemd 240 makes note of a new service type of Type=exec, systemd has raised the hard limit on the RLIMIT_NOFILE to 512K from 4096 for allowing unprivileged userspace processes the ability to allocate many more simultaneous file descriptors, and defaulting to the C.UTF-8 locale by default when no /etc/locale.conf is set.

Some of the other work currently in systemd Git includes:

- Preferring RdRand for x86_64 hardware random number generation in areas where the randomness doesn't have to be the best (most secure) to avoid draining the kernel's random pool. Areas requiring the extra security/secrets though still obviously aren't just solely relying upon RdRand.

- Various sd-boot systemd UEFI booting updates/fixes.

- A new systemd-run-generator command for running arbitrary commands from the kernel command line as system services.

- systemd-analyze security for analyzing the security/sandboxing settings of systemd service units.

- Preparations for OCI container run-time support with systemd nspawn.

And many other fixes and feature work has been building up in Git ahead of systemd 240.