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.

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.

Merged this morning into the systemd code-base was a big feature addition that's been in the works for the better part of one year by Lennart Poettering and other developers.

The newest feature addition for systemd is supporting L2TP, the Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol, as part of its networking code.

Systemd has just merged support for the "Extended Boot Loader" partition, a.k.a. "XBOOTLDR", that is their bootloader specification they hope will allow Linux distribution vendors to better support dual/multi-boot setups.

Lennart Poettering has just tagged the systemd 241 update that includes the "system down" security fixes and other improvements to this widely-used Linux init system.

Just a few days ago marked the systemd 241 release candidate while today Lennart Poettering opted for a second release candidate.

Systemd doesn't tend to have tagged release candidates or any development releases aside from Git prior to issuing new stable releases, but that's different today with the systemd 241 RC1 debut.

The Linux 4.19 kernel brought the ability to disallow the opening of FIFOs and regular files not owned by the user in world-writable sticky directories in the name of security. Had this ability been around previously it could have prevented a number of CVEs going back a long time. In helping ensure this functionality gets utilized, Systemd 241 will now set these sysctl options to enable the behavior by default.

While systemd 240 was released right before Christmas, it looks like systemd 241 will soon be released in order to address the recent "System Down" security vulnerabilities.

Red Hat's systemd team who also work on BUS1 and D-Bus Broker announced a new version of Dbus-Broker to kick off 2019.

With the end of the year upon us, the latest project we're looking at the GitStats on and most popular milestones of the year is for systemd.

Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek, part of the systemd team at Red Hat, has taken the reins from Lennart Poettering to release systemd 240 ahead of Christmas.

It's been over five months already since the release of systemd 239 and a lot of feature work has been amassing for what will end up releasing as systemd 240.

Systemd's latest feature is the concept of "boot counting" that will track kernel boot attempts and failures as part of an automatic boot assessment. Ultimately this is to provide automatic fallback to older kernels should a newer kernel be consistently failing.

At the end of September in Berlin was the All Systems Go! conference focusing on user-space Linux and evolving from what years ago was the annual systemd conference. We've covered many of the interesting sessions from that conference while what we hadn't highlighted until now was Lennart Poettering's systemd update.