Systemd 250 Piles On Yet More Features With New Release Candidate

It was just over one week ago the systemd 250 release candidate was issued (along with a brown paper bag 250-rc2 fix-up release). Systemd 250 has a ton of changes for this init system and more while today systemd 250-rc3 was released with yet more changes in tow.

Besides fixes and other maintenance items in systemd 250-rc3, more minor feature work has continued to land during the release candidate phase. Some of the new material that is now found in systemd 250-rc3 past the prior rc1/rc2 include:

- Introducing KERNEL_INSTALL_MACHINE_ID= support within /etc/machine-info. This value will be preferred over any /etc/machine-id value.

- Support for loading credentials from /loader/credentials/*.cred for credentials like SSH keys, rootfs encryption keys, dm-integrity keys, etc. These are intended for credentials that are not kernel/initrd-specific and thus should be loaded with any kernel image.

- A proper BCD (Boot Configuration Data) parser for Microsoft Windows' boot data used since Windows Vista.

- The systemd network-generator now supports link6 network configurations for having IPv6 link-local connectivity.

- Allowing statically linked builds for bootctl and systemd-bless-boot using the new "-Dlink-boot-shared=false" option. Adding this support was driven by CentOS/RHEL 9 having a full systemd stack except for bootctl/systemd-bless-boot.

- Hole punching improvements for the systemd journal.

- systemd-network-generator is now enabled by default.

- Meson build system updates, CI/test updates, and other maintenance items.

Systemd 250-rc3 can be downloaded from GitHub while the stable version with its big platter of new features should be out soon.