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systemd Planning to Take Over Your Home Directory

posted by martyb on Sunday September 22 2019, @01:00PM   
from the all-your-computer-are-belong-to-us dept.

SemperOSS writes:

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.

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Original Submission

• Re:Ok, but... Re:Ok, but... (Score: 1, Troll) by janrinok on Sunday September 22 2019, @06:21PM (3 children)

  by janrinok (52) on Sunday September 22 2019, @06:21PM (#897200) Journal

  If there are better solutions, where in the FOSS ecosystem are they, and who precisely is stopping everyone from using better solutions?

  A point well made - systemd is not designed for the home user, it is designed for businesses and cloud computing.

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• Re:Ok, but... (Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Sunday September 22 2019, @08:04PM

  by fustakrakich (6150) on Sunday September 22 2019, @08:04PM (#897241) Journal

  Really, this is very true, but where else do we get the chance to come out and throw tomatoes?

  --
  La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..

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• Re:Ok, but... Re:Ok, but... (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Monday September 23 2019, @07:46PM (1 child)

  by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Monday September 23 2019, @07:46PM (#897756) Journal

  Linux was used in the enterprise long before systemd reared it's ugly head. So let's see - Linux is never gonna be the enterprise desktop OS, it's crippled by systems for regular users, infrastructure such as routers aren't going to want to be loaded down with such crap, it's not needed to run servers (or "clouds"), so it's just a way to get more support contracts for redhat for helping fix and maintain an overlay that just makes things more complicated. Anyone remember "nobody got fired for buying I B M " .:. Until they did? Wanna bet we'll see the same with redhat/IBM Linux?

  --
  SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.

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  • Re:Ok, but... (Score: 2) by janrinok on Tuesday September 24 2019, @04:22AM

    by janrinok (52) on Tuesday September 24 2019, @04:22AM (#897955) Journal

    Systemd is very useful for cloud computing. That is why it exists. If you don't exist in the cloud then your OS does not need systemd.

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