SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 22 2019, @02:23PM (9 children)
Well, /etc contains files that are not strictly configuration (e.g. /etc/mtab) and files that are technically configuration but may need to be changed dynamically (e.g. /etc/resolv.conf), which means that /etc has to be on a writeable filesystem — unless, of course, these files are placed somewhere else (like /var) and replaced with symbolic links in /etc for backward compatibility.
So yes, you are right that it does not have to be writeable, but at the same time, you are wrong stating that it only needs to be written if you want to change some configuration system-wide.
Lennart Poettering's fascination with complexity is well-known and the idea of having everything in a binary format or a not-so-human-friendly-but-still-almost-readable format is a pity. I hanker back to the times where I could easily search for a configuration setup with find/grep/awk/... instead of having to rely on soul-searching Google endeavours to discover the right service setup or systemctl option.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday September 22 2019, @02:58PM (6 children)
Gentoo. Nuff said.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday September 22 2019, @04:44PM (1 child)
Who the hell modded you troll for this? +1 coming momentarily. I started my Linux journey on Gentoo more than 15 years ago (back when a 1 GHz T-Bird was top of the line...) and credit it with teaching me to look at *why* things work, not just how.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday September 23 2019, @12:54AM
When you've got Linux users who don't like compiling things, you know you're bigtime.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Troll) by barbara hudson on Sunday September 22 2019, @06:01PM
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Gaaark on Sunday September 22 2019, @07:36PM (1 child)
It's starting to look like Gentoo is a possible for me: I love Manjaro, but it seems that removing systemd is a pain in the ass there.
I might have to look at dual booting Gentoo and go from there.....Gentoo, it seems, has changed from when i used it, but not a whole hell of a lot.
I wish they'd leave things alone unless it ABSOLUTELY makes it better.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday September 23 2019, @12:56AM
If you don't want to compile everything there's Calculate Linux [calculate-linux.org]. Basically Gentoo with a BINHOST and a few handy scripts if you're not using it for server farms.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by corey on Sunday September 22 2019, @09:09PM
Yep, another systemd-free Gentoo user here.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 22 2019, @06:41PM
/etc/mtab -> ../proc/self/mounts
If you are writing to /etc on a regular basis, you are doing it wrong.
(Score: 2) by rleigh on Sunday September 22 2019, @10:14PM
I don't think mtab is a good example, because it's outdated. I eliminated mtab in Debian around 8 years back now, along with the util-linux maintainer who made it use procfs for everything. resolv.conf is fair enough; though most modern distributions make it a symlink. Overall, the direction has been to remove these special-case writable files from /etc and put them in /var or similar, making it possible to have only readonly state in /etc. However, some software, like CUPS, does like to rewrite its configuration in /etc; IMO these services should be putting that dynamic configuration into /var.