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: 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.