With it already having been a few months since systemd 245 debuted with systemd-homed, the systemd developers have begun their release dance for what will be systemd 246.

The BUS1 API did see some activity back in March but with that in-kernel IPC mechanism not yet on approach for landing in the mainline Linux kernel, the Dbus-Broker project for a high-performance D-Bus implementation remains the best solution for the time being.

Beyond the new systemd-homed functionality, another improvement to look forward to in the systemd space this calendar year is systemd-oomd materializing as its new out-of-memory daemon.

Systemd 245 RC2 was released just earlier this week while now it has been succeeded by the stable release of systemd 245.

Released one month ago was systemd 245 RC1 while now a second release candidate is available. Systemd 245 stable should be shipping in the near future as well in order to make some of the spring Linux distribution releases like Fedora 32.

Coming with the imminent systemd 245 is systemd-homed that is making fundamental changes to Linux home directories. Systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering presented at FOSDEM 2020 last weekend on systemd-homed and that video recording is now up.

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

Systemd-homed has been merged as the latest (optional) fundamental change to Linux distributions in how home directories are handled.

While more Linux distributions have begun packaging (and in the case of Fedora, potentially deploying by default) EarlyOOM as the out-of-memory monitoring daemon for trying to improve the Linux desktop's handling of low memory situations, systemd ultimately should be picking up its own out-of-memory daemon in the months ahead.

A new work-in-progress feature for systemd is "PathImages" though there is a suggestion this option be renamed to "MountPaths", but in any case is about allowing arbitrary images / block devices to be mounted at any path by systemd.

As of New Year's morning, systemd's Git tree was at 1,273,896 lines spread across 3,522 commits built up over 42,700+ commits from around 1,500 different authors.

Systemd got its start in 2010 in providing a better init system and expanded its scope from there. As part of our year-end and end-of-2010s articles, here is a look at the top systemd stories from the past distribution controversies to new features and other highlights.

Announced back in September at the All Systems Go event in Berlin was systemd-homed as a new effort to improve home directory handling. Systemd-homed wants to make it easier to migrate home directories, ensure all user data is self-contained, unify user-password and encryption handling, and provide other modern takes on home/user directory functionality. That code is expected to soon land in systemd.

Systemd has a present for you with a new release that comes bearing more features for this Linux init system.

It looks like a big new systemd release will be out in time for Christmas.

The newest feature of systemd is... a new logo.

Happening this week over in Lyon, France is the Embedded Linux Conference Europe and Open-Source Summit Europe events. Developer Chris Simmonds spoke today about systemd and boot time optimizations around it.

Systemd has begun harvesting the automatic suspend rules from ChromeOS for determining which USB devices support automatic suspend well out-of-the-box on Linux.

In addition to announcing systemd-homed for better user home directories, Lennart Poettering also used this year's All Systems Go conference to drum up support for systemd's boot efforts around SD-Boot and the Boot Loader Specification.

Kicking off today in Berlin is the annual All Systems Go conference focused on systemd and other user-space components. Systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering presented on systemd-homed as a new component to systemd that is focused on improving home directory handling.

Systemd 243 finally shipped this morning as the latest major update to this widely used Linux init system.

Released nearly one month ago was the systemd 243 release candidate while the official update has yet to materialize. It looks though like it may be on the horizon with a second release candidate being posted today.

Lennart Poettering has made available the first release candidate of the upcoming systemd 243 update. Systemd 243 is a big one in seeing more than 1,700 commits since the April release of systemd 242.

Adding to the list of new features for systemd 243 is another last-minute addition to this growing init system... Systemd picked up a new service and while some may view it as bloat, should be quite practical at least for those encountering kernel crashes from time to time.

While it would have been nice seeing this next systemd release sooner due to the Zen 2 + RdRand issue with systemd yielding an unbootable system (that is now also being worked around with a BIOS upgrade), the systemd 243 release looks like it will take place in the near future.

Systemd now allows loading of custom BPF programs for network traffic filtering that are applied to all sockets created by processes of a given systemd unit.

In hoping to catch more bugs quickly, systemd now has continuous fuzzing integration via the new "Fuzzit" platform that provides continuous fuzzing as a service.

Five years ago today was the story on Phoronix how the systemd source tree was approaching 550k lines so curiosity got the best of me to see how large is the systemd Git repository today. Well, now it's over 1.2 million lines.

Following this week's release of systemd 242, one of the newly-merged features for what will become systemd 243 is support for MACsec within the networkd code.

Red Hat developer Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek has just tagged the systemd 242 release, which is coming in with yet more features for this init system.