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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: 2) by janrinok on Sunday September 22 2019, @06:17PM (4 children)
RedHat uses systemd. Debian uses systemd. Ubuntu uses systemd. It is not a single distro - it has business benefits for many distros. But you don't have to use it. You probably downloaded it for free, so choose another distro that doesn't use systemd. Your problem has just gone away.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 22 2019, @07:02PM (1 child)
Yes, what you say is true in principal, but not quite so, in practice.
It makes me really sad that Debian went with systemd, by default (when using a linux kernel). Debian always called itself the, "universal operating system'. In the past, there was more truth to this claim. You used to be able to run the same Debian userspace with a Linux kernel, a FreeBSD kernel, a GNU HURD kernel, and even an OpenSolaris kernel. Now, the Linux version is this weird fucked up thing, so knowledge does not transfer, and the maintainers of the non-Linux ports have to do a lot more work-- since the Linux version has been the defacto upstream to the rest of the ports.
I run systems that are not x86. And while ARM is now supported pretty well by many distros, Debian is the only game in town for more obscure architectures. Debian also has, for years, made cross compiling a simple task, that got even easier with their multi-lib. Just apt-get your toolchain and foreign arch libraries and setup binfmt to automatically run arch-x binaries via qemu so cross builds of things using autoconf, with tests that assume it is running native, just work.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @05:48AM
Maybe true for your principal, but not true in principle. See what I did there? Two different words, with two different spellings. Now, I suppose, you will accuse me of being a pendant.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 22 2019, @10:59PM
Devuan and Artix do not use systemd.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Monday September 23 2019, @07:34PM
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