systemd 257 Debuts With systemd-keyutil & systemd-sbsign Tools, Other Improvements

Coincidentally coming one day after the GNU Shepherd 1.0 service manager release, the systemd 257 release is now shipping as the newest feature release for this widely-used service manager / init system to Linux systems. Systemd 257 brings a number of new features and improvements for powering late 2024 and early 2025 Linux distributions.

Systemd 257 brings some new tools like systemd-keyutil and systemd-sbsign, improvements to various existing sub-commands, prepping for greater Varlink use, and more. Some of the quick systemd 257 highlights include:

- The "systemd-tmpfiles --purge" option is reworked to only apply to tmpfiles.d/ lines marked with the new "$" flag. This is to better address systemd's --purge deleting too many files by accident.

- Support for cgroup v1 is now considered obsolete and systemd by default will ignore configurations enabling them. Temporarily the SYSTEMD_CGROUP_ENABLE_LEGACY_FORCE=1 option allows re-enabling them. But systemd 258 plans to remove cgroup v1 support.

- Systemd 258 also aims to remove support for the (deprecated) System V service scripts support.

- The systemd JSON API is now available as a public interface of libsystemd via sd-json.

- The Varlink IPC API is now available with libsystemd via sd-varlink. This is part of systemd looking at greater use of Varlink moving forward.

- Multi-Path TCP (MPTCP) is now supported as a socket protocol for .socket units.

- Simpler initialization of the system clock during boot and updates has been simplified.

- The kernels' Ctrl-Alt-Delete handling is now re-enabled during late shutdown.

- Generator processes invoked by the service manager will now receive a new environment variable of "$SYSTEMD_SOFT_REBOOTS_COUNT" to indicate how many times the system has been soft-rebooted.

- systemd-boot menu will now react to volume up/down rocker presses in the same way as arrow up/down presses. This is for smartphones and other devices that may have volume up/down rockers but not arrow keys.

- bootctl now optionally supports installing UEFI Secure Boot databases for systemd-boot to pick-up and automatically enroll in if the system is booted in Setup Mode.

- A new systemd-sbsign tool to sign EFI PE binaries.

- New fields have been added for /etc/os-release of RELEASE_TYPE=, EXPERIMENT=, EXPERIMENT_URL=.

- A number of patches to ease building systemd against the musl C library.

- The new systemd-keyutil tool for consolidating various key/certificate operations.

Those rolling systemd from source can grab the systemd v257 release via GitHub.