systemd 255 has reached stable status and can therefore be included in the releases of Linux distributions in the first half of 2024. The innovations are quite extensive. What stands out is a blue screen of death, which systemd now allows to move into Linux. But the support of Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs) v2.0 has also received various improvements. SystemV scripts have now been given deprecated status and will no longer be supported in the future.
Advertisement
The Blue Screen of Death is caused by a new service in Linux systemd-bsod provided. It should display recorded error messages in full screen, provided they have the log level LOG_EMERG. The service is still considered experimental, so the public interface could still change, the developers say.
Numerous optimizations in systemd
There have been some improvements regarding TPM2 support as well as disk encryption and authentication. So can systemd-cryptenroll now deal more flexibly with TPM2 and the keys used. Security is also helped by the fact that: systemd-boot now no longer loads non-verified Devicetree blobs if UEFI SecureBoot is active. Sleep mode with writing the memory contents for hibernation to swap files now also works when they are opened Btrfsfile systems.
The “Soft Reboot” function announced by Lennart Poettering in May of this year, which only restarts programs and services in user space, now appears to be usable. The new option SurviveFinalKillSignal= is used to configure the unit to be skipped during the last round of SIGTERM/SIGKILL during shutdown. This is part of the necessary configuration so that processes on a unit can survive the soft reboot. Besides, power systemctl automatically perform a soft reboot if there is a new root file system underneath /run/nextboot is found and a restart is initiated.
Further changes and more detailed explanations can be found in the systemd release notes on Github.
The introduction of a BSoD in Linux, as previously known from Windows, may be met with incomprehension by some. However, the system crash error message as a BSoD including a QR code with a link to further information instead of the flood of messages of a kernel panic can be more understandable for end users. In the event of a kernel panic, you might overlook the fact that a system restart is necessary, for example.
(dmk)