systemd

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systemd
Original author(s) Lennart Poettering, Kay Sievers
Developer(s) Lennart Poettering, Kay Sievers and others[1]
Initial release 30 March 2010 (2010-03-30)
Stable release 204 / 9 May 2013 (2013-05-09)
Written in C[2]
Operating system Linux
Size ~2.5 MB
Type Init daemon
License GNU LGPL 2.1+ (free software)[3]
Website freedesktop.org/.../systemd/

In computing, systemd is a replacement for the Linux init daemon (either System V or BSD-style). It is intended to provide a better framework for expressing services' dependencies, allow more work to be done concurrently (possibly in parallel) at system startup, and to reduce shell overhead. The name comes from the Unix convention of suffixing the names of system daemons (background processes) with the letter "d".[4]

Systemd initializes a platform, but also serves to consolidate event logging, and can replace syslog. Because it replaces two administrative systems, for system administrators this means the number of in-kernel mechanisms it attends offer a steep learning curve.

Systemd is maintained by Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers, with many other contributors.[1] It is published as free software under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1 or later.[3]

Contents

Design

The systemd journal subsystem can forward event messages to syslog, so both can coexist. Systemd logging is stored in binary form, and it also has mechanisms to check the source is valid as an intended source.

Some features of systemd are:

  • It provides aggressive parallelization capabilities.
  • Offers on-demand starting of daemons.
  • Service startup is determined by a configuration file in a declarative language, rather than a shell script for each service.
  • Supports Sockets and D-Bus activation for starting services.
  • Supports snapshotting and restoring of the system state
  • Keeps track of processes using Linux cgroups, instead of PIDs. This means that daemons cannot "escape" systemd even by double-forking.
  • Support for trigger system events at a calendar-based time rather than specifying it in relative or repeating time intervals.

In April 2012, the official udev source tree was merged into systemd.[5]

Adoption

Distributions in which systemd is enabled by default:

Distributions where systemd is available, but not enabled by default:

Inclusion in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 is also planned.[22]

systemd has been proposed as an external dependency of GNOME 3.2 by systemd's author.[23] The latest decision by the GNOME release team concludes that basic functionality should not rely upon systemd.[24]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b "README", systemd (freedesktop.org), retrieved 2012-09-09 
  2. ^ "systemd", Analysis Summary (Ohloh), retrieved 2011-06-16 
  3. ^ a b Lennart Poettering (2012-04-21), systemd Status Update, retrieved 2012-04-28 
  4. ^ Lennart Poettering, Kay Sievers, Thorsten Leemhuis (2012-05-08), Control Centre: The systemd Linux init system, The H, retrieved 2012-09-09 
  5. ^ Sievers, Kay, "Commit importing udev into systemd", systemd (freedesktop.org), retrieved 25 May 2012 
  6. ^ Dj Walker-Morgan (2011-05-24), Fedora 15's Lovelock released, The H, retrieved 2012-08-22 
  7. ^ Phayz (2012-01-17), Review of 2011, Frugalware Project, retrieved 2012-08-22 
  8. ^ Fabian Scherschel (2012-05-23), Mageia 2 arrives with GNOME 3 and systemd, The H, retrieved 2012-08-22 
  9. ^ Dj Walker-Morgan (2011-08-29), Mandriva 2011 arrives with systemd, The H, retrieved 2012-08-22 
  10. ^ mer Architecture, 2012-04-27, retrieved 2013-04-24 
  11. ^ Chris von Eitzen (2011-11-16), openSUSE 12.1 arrives with systemd and Btrfs, The H, retrieved 2012-08-22 
  12. ^ systemd is now the default on new installations, Arch Linux News, 2012-10-13, retrieved 2012-10-29 
  13. ^ Full switch to Systemd with Claire-2012.10 ISO released today, Chakra News, 2012-10-28, retrieved 2013-02-07 
  14. ^ Systemd is now the default on new installations, André Fabian Delgado News, 2012-10-31 
  15. ^ Systemd branch merged, NixOS News, 2013-01-21, retrieved 2013-02-07 
  16. ^ Red Flag Linux Does Its First Major Release In Years, Phoronix, 2013-04-24, retrieved 2013-04-24 
  17. ^ systemd, Debian wiki, retrieved 2011-07-21 
  18. ^ Jake Edge (2011-07-27), Debian debates systemd, LWN.net 
  19. ^ "Comment #210", systemd – bug #318365 (Gentoo's Bugzilla), retrieved 2011-07-05 
  20. ^ systemd, Gentoo's Documentation, retrieved 2011-07-05 
  21. ^ systemd, Gentoo wiki, retrieved 2012-08-26 
  22. ^ Tim Burke (2012-06-27), "Red Hat Enterprise Linux Roadmap Highlights" (PDF), presentation 
  23. ^ Lennart Poettering (2011-05-18), "systemd as an external dependency", desktop-devel mailing list (GNOME), retrieved 2011-05-26 
  24. ^ Frederic Peters (2011-11-04), "20121104 meeting minutes", release-team mailing list (GNOME), retrieved 2013-01-14 

External links