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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, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 22 2019, @05:48PM (1 child)
" If there are better solutions, where in the FOSS ecosystem are they, and who precisely is stopping everyone from using better solutions?"
They were replaced by SystemD, and the people stopping us from using them (easily) are the same people pushing SystemD, trying to sink their hooks into everything and its brother and make them non-operable without it. For some people it probably does help, even if you ignore the support fees to Red Hat (which I've long suspected was the primary goal). For my use-cases it's about as useful as a festering bowl of dog snot. For the systems I manage, I use non-SystemD distros like Devuan wherever possible, but we have to do interop testing and our customers mostly use RHEL and Debian derivate distros, so I have constant A/B testing on the two init systems. Happily it's now at the point I don't have to bother trying to fix SystemD problems, I can just wipe the VM and start a new one.
Now that Debian is looking to cave completely and go SystemD-only it's probably going to complicate forks like Devuan enough to push me to running BSD wherever we don't need something for interop.
Saying all that usually gets me called scared of change, which is one of the SystemD supporter's standard accusations. I object to change for the worse, which SystemD is for me. I have no problem with changes like going from iptables to nftables. Ther's no improvement without change, but not all change is an improvement. Turning Linux into Windows is not an improvement.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Sunday September 22 2019, @06:15PM
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