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.

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.