Systemd 242 Gearing Up For Release With XBOOTLDR Support, Other New Features

With it approaching two months since the release of systemd 241, Lennart Poettering and his gang of systemd developers are putting the finishing touches on systemd 242 with a release candidate now being available.

Among the changes coming with systemd 242 include:

- Networkd now supports L2TP tunnels, among other network settings/features for systemd.

- Systemd boot and bootctl now support the Extended Boot Loader partition (XBOOTLDR).

- Systemctl can now request a reboot into the boot loader menu or specific boot loader entry with the --boot-load-menu= and --boot-loader-entry= options.

- OCI runtime support for nspawn.

- Support for booting with a kernel command line option of systemd.volatile=overlay to cause the root file-system to be setup as an overlayfs mount paired with tmpfs, which will cause no changes to the underlying root device and all changes lost at reboot.

- The ACRN hypervisor and Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) are now detected by systemd-detect-virt.

- Various networkctl sub-commands now supporting globbing wildcards for network interface names to match against all existing interfaces.

- The $PIDFILE environment variable is set to point to an absolute path with the PIDFile for processes of that service.

- A new usb-gadget.target target.

- New unit settings of CPUQuotaPeriodSec= / ProtectHostname= / NetworkNamespacePath=.

- ExecStart lines in unit files now prefixed with ":" will disable environment variable substitution.

- Time units gained new settings that are triggered when the system clock is changed or timezone modified.

Systemd 242 is shaping up to be another big feature release. Those wanting to vet the release candidate can grab the latest sources from GitHub.