Systemd Had A Pretty Big 2020 With Homed, OOMD Components Merged

Written by Michael Larabel in systemd on 29 December 2020 at 12:05 AM EST. 26 Comments
SYSTEMD
The systemd service and system manager had another busy year with the merging of "homed" for modernizing and reinventing home directory capabilities to "oomd" being merged for improving the Linux memory pressure / out-of-memory handling, among other new features coming to light.

The pandemic didn't slow down work on systemd but was another very busy time continuing to introduce new features and trying to modernize longstanding concepts. Systemd as of today is up to 1.469 million lines of code spanning 48,463 commits from around 1,746 different authors.


There have been 5,424 commits to systemd in 2020 compared to 5,085 last year. Systemd this year saw 309k lines of code added and around 114k lines of code removed.

Lennart Poettering of Red Hat continues leading systemd development and being responsible for just over a quarter of all patches to systemd Git. The other top contributors remain mostly Red Hat folks. Following Lennart in commits this year were Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek, Yu Watanabe, Susant Sahani, Daan De Meyer, and Frantisek Sumsal. There were around 360 authors to systemd this year -- the most ever and up from the roughly 314 in 2019.


With new functionality continuing to be introduced, the line count only continues rising higher... More Git statistics on systemd as of today can be seen here.

As for the most popular systemd news in 2020 on Phoronix:

Systemd-Homed Merged As A Fundamental Change To Linux Home Directories
Systemd-homed has been merged as the latest (optional) fundamental change to Linux distributions in how home directories are handled.

Systemd Is Approaching 1.3 Million Lines While Poettering Lost Top Contributor Spot For 2019
As of New Year's morning, systemd's Git tree was at 1,273,896 lines spread across 3,522 commits built up over 42,700+ commits from around 1,500 different authors.

Learn More About Systemd-Homed For How Linux Home Directories Are Being Reinvented
Coming with the imminent systemd 245 is systemd-homed that is making fundamental changes to Linux home directories. Systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering presented at FOSDEM 2020 last weekend on systemd-homed and that video recording is now up.

Systemd-OOMD Continues Coming Together For Better Linux Out-Of-Memory Handling
Beyond the new systemd-homed functionality, another improvement to look forward to in the systemd space this calendar year is systemd-oomd materializing as its new out-of-memory daemon.

Systemd 245 Released - First Version Including Systemd-Homed
Systemd 245 RC2 was released just earlier this week while now it has been succeeded by the stable release of systemd 245.

Systemd Will Be Working To Improve Out-Of-Memory Linux Handling With Facebook OOMD
While more Linux distributions have begun packaging (and in the case of Fedora, potentially deploying by default) EarlyOOM as the out-of-memory monitoring daemon for trying to improve the Linux desktop's handling of low memory situations, systemd ultimately should be picking up its own out-of-memory daemon in the months ahead.

Systemd 245 Shipping Soon With Systemd-Homed, Systemd-Repart Partitioner
Systemd 245 is soon shipping as the first feature update of 2020 and it's another big one.

Systemd 245 RC2 Released With Systemd-Homed, Partitioner + More
Released one month ago was systemd 245 RC1 while now a second release candidate is available. Systemd 245 stable should be shipping in the near future as well in order to make some of the spring Linux distribution releases like Fedora 32.

systemd-oomd Looks Like It Will Come Together For systemd 247
With systemd 246 releasing soon, it looks like the new out-of-memory daemon will be merged shortly afterwards in allowing sufficient time for testing ahead of systemd 247.

A Microsoft Addition For systemd 246 Exposes Host OS Information To Containers
There is a last minute change from a Microsoft engineer to the upcoming systemd 246 that is now undergoing release preparations.

Systemd "Path Images" Feature Allows Mounting Images At Arbitrary Paths
A new work-in-progress feature for systemd is "PathImages" though there is a suggestion this option be renamed to "MountPaths", but in any case is about allowing arbitrary images / block devices to be mounted at any path by systemd.

Systemd 246 Released With Many Changes
Systemd 246 is out today as the newest version of this dominant Linux init system and system/service manager. Systemd 246 has a lot of new functionality in time for making it into at least some of the autumn 2020 Linux distributions.

Systemd 247 Released With Experimental Out-of-Memory Daemon, New Credentials Capability
Systemd 247 is out today as the latest major version of this Linux init system. Like most systemd releases, systemd 247 is very heavy on new features.

Systemd 246 Is On The Way With Many Changes
With it already having been a few months since systemd 245 debuted with systemd-homed, the systemd developers have begun their release dance for what will be systemd 246.

systemd 246-RC1 Released
The first release candidate of the forthcoming systemd 246 is now available for testing.

Systemd 246 Release Is Imminent With RC2 Released
Systemd 246 should be shipping in the days ahead.

Systemd 247 Still Aiming To Integrate systemd-oomd
Systemd developers are still hoping to introduce systemd-oomd as part of the next release.

Systemd 247 Merges Systemd-OOMD For Improving Low-Memory/Out-Of-Memory Handling
Merged just minutes ago into systemd Git is the new systemd-oomd component pushed along by Facebook.

Dbus-Broker 23 Released For High Performance D-Bus
The BUS1 API did see some activity back in March but with that in-kernel IPC mechanism not yet on approach for landing in the mainline Linux kernel, the Dbus-Broker project for a high-performance D-Bus implementation remains the best solution for the time being.

Systemd 247-RC1 Released With Systemd-OOMD, Systemd-Homed Now Defaults To Btrfs
The first release candidate of systemd 247 is now available for testing and it's a huge feature release.
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