Systemd 216 Piles On More Features, Aims For New User-Space VT

Lennart Poettering announced the systemd 216 release on Tuesday and among its changes is a more complete systemd-resolved that has nearly complete caching DNS and LLMNR stub resolver, a new systemd terminal library, and a number of new commands.

The systemd 216 release also has improvements to various systemd sub-commands, an nss-mymachines NSS module was added, a new networkctl client tool, KDBUS updates against Linux 3.17's memfd, networkd improvements, a new systemd-terminal library for implementing full TTY stream parsing and rendering, a new systemd-journal-upload utility, an LZ4 compressor for journald, a new systemd-escape tool, a new systemd-firstboot component, and much more.

The purpose of the systemd-terminal library with full TTY stream parsing/rendering is aiming to be used for implementing a full user-space VT subsystem to replace the current kernel VT implementation. Around for a while now has also been KMSCON as a DRM-based terminal emulator separate from the kernel with an aim of killing the kernel's VT support so the virtual terminal is handled by user-space, similar to systemd's new goal (there's also the CONFIG_VT mayhem).

Those wishing to read more about all of the new functionality found in systemd 216 can read the mailing list announcement.