systemd 252-rc1 Introduces New systemd-measure Tool, Other New Features

Systemd 252-rc1 is out as the first test candidate ahead of this next big feature release for this dominant Linux init systemd. Systemd 252 has been working on a new "systemd-measure" tool and a wide variety of other changes.

As part of today's systemd 252-rc1 release is a warning that they intend to eliminate cgroups v1 support after the end of 2023. Thankfully most modern Linux distributions have been running with cgroups v2, but this is a warning to all others. Systemd is also planning to remove support for split-usr and unmerged-usr handling in H2'2023 as a more pressing warning for some Linux distributions.

New with systemd 252-rc1 are features including:

- systemd-measure has been added as a helper to precalculate PCR measurements to make it easier facilitating TPM2 policies.

- Systemd will set a "support-ended" taint flag if it detects the OS image is past its end-of-support date. This goes along with os-release gaining a new "SUPPORT_END=" field for specifying a date when the OS support is considered then unsupported.

- New settings of ConditionCredential= and AssertCredential= for skipping/failing units if a certain credential is not provided.

- DefaultDeviceTimeoutSec= can be used for specifying the default timeout for devices.

- A change to allow for more resource isolation between different user services competing for the CPU.

- Support with systemd for a full preset in the "first boot" condition rather than just enable-only.

- C.UTF-8 is now used as the default locale when nothing else is configured.

- New watchdog-related D-Bus properties are now published by systemd.

- The UEFI monotonic boot counter is now included in the random seed as additional entropy.

- Systemd boot support for booting in EFI mixed mode for a 64-bit kernel with 32-bit UEFI firmware is now supported.

- Improved detection of Parallels and KubeVirt virtualization.

- OpenSSL is now the default crypto back-end for systemd-resolved while GnuTLS is still supported.

- Systemd-repart now supports creating SquashFS partitions as well as dm-verity partitions.

- systemd-oomd now sends a "Killed" D-Bus signal when a cgroup is killed.

The full list of changes and more information on systemd 252-rc1 is available via GitHub.