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from the all-your-computer-are-belong-to-us dept.
At the All Systems Go conference in Berlin 20-22 September, Lennart Poettering proposed a new extension to systemd, systemd-homed.service. A video of his session can be downloaded from media.ccc.de with accompanying slides [PDF].
In his presentation, Poettering outlines a number of problems he sees with the current system, like /etc needs to be writeable, UIDs need to be consistent across systems, and lack of encryption and resource management.
His goals with the proposed solution are migrateable and self-contained, UID-independent home directories with extensible user records that unify the user's password and encryption key; LUKS locking on system suspend; and Yubikey support.
He identifies a number of problems this new idea could cause with SSH logins, disk space assignments, UID assignments, and LUKS locking.
He plans to introduce JSON user records that can be queried via a Varlink interface and to a certain extent are convertible to and from existing formats. The home directories will be stored as LUKS-encrypted files that will be managed by the proposed new service, systemd-homed.service. The system integration will be supported by pam_systemd and systemd-logind.service.
It will be interesting to see how the world responds to this new take on systemd's ever-increasing encroachment of Linux.
... and lastly, this story is brought to you from a systemd-free laptop.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 22 2019, @01:38PM (11 children)
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, systemd/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, systemd plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning systemd system made useful by the systemd corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run a modified version of the systemd system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of systemd which is widely used today is often called "Linux", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the systemd system, developed by Red Hat. There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the systemd operating system: the whole system is basically systemd with Linux added, or systemd/Linux. All the so-called "Linux" distributions are really distributions of systemd/Linux.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 22 2019, @01:42PM (7 children)
RMS died for their sins.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday September 22 2019, @05:35PM (6 children)
RMS also ate his own toejam, and apparently now he is also one of Epstein's buddies.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 22 2019, @05:40PM (2 children)
Epstein dindu nuffin.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday September 22 2019, @05:47PM (1 child)
Maybe he didn't, maybe they all blew him willingly. But that's not what matters here.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 22 2019, @07:39PM
Well, what the fuck DOES matter?? It's been all downhill since Kennedy died. Has anything changed dramatically? No, it's the same old bullshit since the Gulf of Tonkin...
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Pav on Monday September 23 2019, @07:51AM (2 children)
Epstein? Er, no... RMS was defending a dead friend, a friend who couldn't defend himself. Minsky had slept with one of Epsteins girls... they call it statuatory rape, which it was... but apparently she was legal in Boston, Mass where Minsky was living. Considering the blackmailing of the powerful that Epstein was involved in, I wonder what the angle was with Minsky. Other power seekers certainly benefited by pushing RMS aside.
I don't think many doubt RMS is on the spectrum and misses much of the emotional content of things he talks about, which unfortunately makes him a poor politician in some ways. His defense of Minsky was certainly a fail. He understands loyalty though obviously, which is often a strength of many on the aspergers spectrum. and has a conception of freedom which I've benefited from massively. He has certainly proved to be a visionary in his domain of expertise.
(Score: 1) by Remmy on Monday September 23 2019, @11:38AM (1 child)
Only thing... No one has stepped forward saying Minksy did sleep with the Epstein girl... Only story so far is that a girl offered herself to him and he turned her down.
(Score: 2) by Pav on Monday September 23 2019, @01:25PM
Her deposition said she had been forced to have sex with him. While it's true that she could have lied, I'd say it's more likely she's being truthful.
The problems people have are that she was 17 which was statuatory rape in the juristiction they were currently in, and that no 17yr old girl would have offered themselves to Minsky in any case... and Minsky should have known that - therefore he committed sexual assault. Stallmans argument was that he didn't think Minsky was the kind of guy to have sex with someone against their will, and he believed she may have presented herself as being entirely willing (even if Epstein had privately pressured her). Stallman also argued Minsky might not have been aware of the age of consent was different to where he lived (16 in Boston).
(Score: 4, Informative) by Nuke on Sunday September 22 2019, @04:12PM
You've got it wrong. What you are refering to as systemd/Linux is, in fact, Lennartix
(Score: 2) by EEMac on Sunday September 22 2019, @04:54PM
Once Microsoft comes out with a Linux distro, we'll see how true this is!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DECbot on Monday September 23 2019, @05:29AM
I don't think you should call it systemD/Linux until gcc is replaced. That's probably going to happen shortly after systemd-homed.service is dumped on the community to fix. Then we'll get our systemD-ccd.service which will compile systemd.bitecodeLibs at runtime into nearly C code from json header files encrypted in LUKS containers. These applications are streamed through logind to ensure the only have the permissions of the user launching the application and then compiled into random executables assessable only to systemD.run_exe into your choice of native environment;
WindowsWayland for the GUI and PowerShelld for the command line. Component styling will be handled by systemd-Gui-StylesD.lib, which is a four way merge of GTK5, CSS3, .Net, and the Java Swing libraries. Each application will be sandboxed in its own container managed by systemd.containerd. To ensure the application is truely isolated systemd_FSd will partition a SystemD.zyztemd.fs journaled and checksumed encrypted virtual had disk only accessible to the application. These disk drives will be registered in the EFI to the application to ensure they cannot be mounted by systems not managed by systemD.cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base