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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, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Sunday September 22 2019, @04:55PM (6 children)
Seems like we need a distro that's focused on SOHO systems instead of enterprise computing. Luckily, systemd does seem to be pretty modular, so distros are free to pick and choose which components they want to use. Some parts of it make sense for SOHO computing, other parts (like this) really don't, and a SOHO/single-user focused distro should leave out the components that don't make sense in that context.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Sunday September 22 2019, @05:43PM (2 children)
When debian went systemd, I felt that the fight was over.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by janrinok on Sunday September 22 2019, @06:19PM
It was - you can choose whether to use a systemd distro or not. What is there to argue about?
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 22 2019, @06:53PM
Not so much.
VOID is fighting the good fight. There are only a few guys working on it, but it is amazing how good their stuff is. It's runit based, rolling release, and more stable than Arch. The guys who are behind it wanted all the software of Linux, but more of a BSD package system. So it is Linux for Unix people. And it is EU based, which has some advantages.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Sunday September 22 2019, @07:54PM (1 child)
Oh c'mon... Who needs a "distro"? Just write a script to collect all the source files and compile from that. What's this obsession with market share? Everybody wants to make a million bucks off their favorite hobby. Just be satisfied your electronic contraption runs without Microsoft.
But, if you insist, the path of least resistance is Slackware. Full installation takes less than 10 minutes. Just remember "nomodeset" in case your video fucks up
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 22 2019, @11:03PM
You're welcome [linuxfromscratch.org]
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Sunday September 22 2019, @10:58PM
Like Slackware.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.