Systemd 222 Will Do Away With Its Accelerometer

For the past four years in systemd there's been a Udev accelerometer helper for exposing the device orientation as a property. With the upcoming systemd 222 release, that will change and instead users taking advantage of device orientation information should switch to iio-sensor-proxy 1.0+.

Systemd 222 is losing some weight in the form of dropping the accelerometer helper as that functionality is now bundled as part of the latest iio-sensor-proxy. The iio-sensor-proxy library is an IIO sensor to D-Bus proxy that in turn depends on systemd and libgudev. The iio-sensor-proxy support already allows the GNOME 3.16+ desktop to automatically change orientation based upon the position of the display panel.

When systemd 222 is out, users will need to upgrade to at least iio-sensor-proxy 1.0 for having this functionality, as indicated by the updated news item after the few hundred lines of code were deleted last week.