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.

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.