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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 22 2019, @02:13PM
I am not a admin and my years of participating in distro development seem over. However, I really disliked fedora occasionally breaking on me and I am really at a loss of how to debug systemd breakage.
Perhaps its my own unfamiliarity with the various subsystems, but it seems other init systems at least make it easier to figure out what the hell is going on when something breaks. I switched to Devuan a year ago and have not had an unfixable problem. I even switched to openrc recently. I've never been happier with my system. If the unstable branch was easier to install i would probably have switched all my systems (still plan to, but need time).
There's been a lot, and not always fair, criticism on systemd, but from my own experience, its not the best way forward. And I hope the alternatives keep their momentum and stay alive until this realization dawns on the bigger distros.