SoylentNews

Systemd introduces "Portable Services"

posted by mrpg on Wednesday May 30 2018, @12:10AM   
from the one-process-to-rule-them-all dept.

mechanicjay writes:

Systemd Introduces "Portable Services" Functionality, Similar To Containers

Lennart is at it again, making complicated things that nobody asked for.

The past several months Lennart Poettering has been working on a "portable services" concept and that big ticket new feature has now landed in Systemd. Portable services are akin to containers but different.

[...] A portable service is ultimately just an OS tree, either inside of a directory tree, or inside a raw disk image containing a Linux file system. This tree is called the "image". It can be "attached" or "detached" from the system. When "attached" specific systemd units from the image are made available on the host system, then behaving pretty much exactly like locally installed system services. When "detached" these units are removed again from the host, leaving no artifacts around (except maybe messages they might have logged).

[...] The primary focus use-case of "portable services" is to extend the host system with encapsulated extensions, but provide almost full integration with the rest of the system, though possibly restricted by effective security knobs. This focus includes system extensions otherwise sometimes called "super-privileged containers".

---

Original Submission

• Re:Ultimately, SystemD is about hacking into syste (Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday May 30 2018, @03:40AM

  by Thexalon (636) on Wednesday May 30 2018, @03:40AM (#686073)

  Slackware is still chugging along as one of the distros that never got excited about systemd in the first place.

  I encountered a guy in uni who had the same problem Lennart seems to have: He wanted to completely revamp a system for basically no reason, and we let him do it, but in the end he couldn't actually build what he said he was going to nor could he explain why what he wanted was better than what the rest of us had built that was working just fine. The vision might be there, but it's so handwavy that nobody else can take up the work for him, nor can anybody check his work to see whether what he's trying to do makes the slightest bit of sense.

  --
  The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.

  Parent

  Starting Score:	1		point
  Moderation		+4
  Insightful=3, Informative=1, Total=4
  Extra 'Insightful' Modifier		0
  Karma-Bonus Modifier		+1
  Total Score:		5