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.

At last week's All Systems Go! 2018 conference in Berlin, Davide Cavalca talked about Facebook's use of systemd in 2018 and how it's expanded since their talk a year ago on the subject.

With BUS1 still appearing out in the distant for the mainline Linux kernel as an in-kernel IPC mechanism, dbus-broker is the year-and-a-half long effort so far at making a faster D-Bus compliant implementation in user-space.

Veteran systemd and BUS1 developers are David Herrmann and Tom Gundersen have been working on "nettools" as a new network configuration libraries project for Linux.

Merged today into systemd is basic keydev support for cryptsetup-generator to allow unlocking an encrypted drive by using a key file that is stored on an external drive.

Systemd will now resort to using Intel's RdRand hardware random number generator directly if the Linux kernel is unable to provide the init system with sufficient entropy.

With last week's release of systemd 239 one of the key new features is the introduction of Portable Services. Systemd Portable Services is a new concept that is akin to Linux containers while at this stage is considered still a preview/experimental feature.

The big systemd 239 feature update is now officially released.

It has already been three months since the release of systemd 238 and as such release preparations are now underway for systemd 239.

The past several months Lennart Poettering has been working on a "portable services" concept and that big ticket new feature has now landed in Systemd. Portable services are akin to containers but different.

While systemd 237 was released just over one month ago, systemd 238 was released today as the next installment of this init system.

Not only is Linux 4.15 coming today but the first systemd stable release of 2018 is also now available.

The first systemd update of 2018 should soon be here.

The next release of systemd, v237, will introduce support for WireGuard. WireGuard as a reminder is the effort to provide a fast, modern and secure VPN tunnel that eventually plans to be part of the mainline Linux kernel.

Systemd had a busy 2017 and its code-base is now up to over one million lines.

Lennart Poettering has announced the release of systemd 236 as the init system's final release of 2017.

Lennart Poettering has begun his release wrangling process in getting systemd 236 ready for release this month.

The annual systemd conference, All Systems Go!, that is also about other user-space Linux technologies, has wrapped up in Berlin.

Lennart Poettering published the systemd 235 update today.

Succeeding systemd 233 is now systemd 234 with yet more features added as well as a new build system.

Systemd can now be built with the Meson build system as an alternative to its traditional Make support.

Lennart Poettering has announced the release of systemd 233.

Systemd 233 is expected to be released in the days ahead and as usual it's packing new features and various additions.

Just in case any of you are running a slightly older Linux system that is still running systemd 228, it turns out there was a local root exploit in that version.

With systemd having the most commits ever in 2015 for this project, I was curious to see how the statistics for 2016 compared... To some surprise, the number of commits to systemd fell sharply and the code churn is also down to a point not seen in a few years.

Lennart Poettering has announced the release of systemd 232 and as usual this new release is packing a significant amount of new features.

For those fond of the open and free RISC-V instruction set architecture, the basic changes have been made so systemd now supports this CPU architecture.

We have already covered some of the interesting talks from this year's systemd conference including how to use it for application sandboxing, a new wireless daemon coming to replace wpa_supplicant, and BUS1 is on the way. But saving the best for last in another presentation to watch this weekend for those interested in systemd: Lennart Poettering's state of the union address for systemd and a look ahead to 2017 features.

Another one of the interesting systemd.conf 2016 presentations in Berlin was a talk by Djalal Harouni of EndoCode for using systemd to carry out application sandboxing.