Systemd 245 Shipping Soon With Systemd-Homed, Systemd-Repart Partitioner

Systemd 245 is soon shipping as the first feature update of 2020 and it's another big one.

Most notable with systemd 245 is the introduction of systemd-homed for reimagining how Linux home directories are managed and modernizing them. Systemd-homed allows for better handling password and encryption management, better self-containment and migratable, and other improvements. Expect systemd-homed to continue to be expanded upon in future releases. As part of systemd-homed are other new features that are related like the systemd "userdb" bits for supporting rich user and group records in a JSON format.

Systemd 245 is also bringing systemd-repart as a declarative repartitioner for GPT partition tables. The intended use-case for systemd-repart is expanding minimized operating system images and where new partitions may be created on first boot. Systemd-repart can only add and grow partitions but not delete, shrink, or move partitions.

Systemd 245 also makes systemd-journald multi-instantiable, a number of new network features in systemd-networkd, new SD-BUS APIs, systemd-growfs can now grow XFS partitions, systemd-cryptsetup can now unlock encrypted volumes by the likes of YubiKeys, a new per-service sandboxing option for preventing write access to the system clock, and a number of other additions.

Systemd 245 RC1 is available for testing this morning on GitHub.