Systemd 249-rc1 Released With Many New Features

The first release candidate of systemd 249 is now available for testing with yet more new and improved features.

Systemd 249 is going to be another big summertime update to this Linux init system. There are a ton of changes to find with systemd 249 and when going through the lengthy list this evening, some of the items that jumped out include:

- Systemd-sysusers and systemd-firstboot now supports querying information from the credential subsystems.

- The systemd-repart partition configurations have a new "MakeDirectories=" option to create arbitrary directories inside file-systems as they are created.

- The /etc/os-release file has new optional variables of IMAGE_VERSION= and IMAGE_ID= around operating system image information.

- Changes to the --image= switch handling for the likes of systemd-nspawn and systemd-dissect to allow for "simple and generic whole-file-system A/B updates" where new operating system versions are dropped into partitions.

- A new udev hardware database for FireWire devices.

- The native Journal protocol is now properly documented.

- Various DHCP server improvements.

- systemd-detect-virt can now correctly identify Amazon EC2 environments.

The complete list can be found in the NEWS file. Systemd 249-rc1 can be downloaded via GitHub.