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systemd Planning to Take Over Your Home Directory

posted by martyb on Sunday September 22 2019, @01:00PM   Printer-friendly
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.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Sunday September 22 2019, @07:44PM (2 children)

    by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Sunday September 22 2019, @07:44PM (#897234) Journal
    Maybe Red Flag Linux and Huawei Linux are systemd-free? Inquiring minds like to look for material that makes systemd look like an NSA plot ... and it's the only real reason to have systemd if you're not Redhat selling support services.
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  • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Monday September 23 2019, @07:42AM (1 child)

    by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Monday September 23 2019, @07:42AM (#897454) Journal

    There are still distros that do not use systemd: Devuan, Alpine Linux, ArtixLinux, Void, Slackware, Funtoo and Gentoo, GUIX, CRUX, PCLinuxOS, Manjaro OpenRC, Adelie Linux, Obarun, KISS Linux, and of course Linux-From-Scratch.

    It is also relatively easy to choose another init system for Arch Linux and Debian Linux, plus all of their derivatives.

    Inquiring minds like to look for material that makes systemd look like an NSA plot

    Paranoia is a terrible problem. SELinux was supported by NSA - so that they could secure their own systems. But we don't hear the same hue and cry about that nowadays, do we? There is no evidence of systemd 'phoning home' that I have seen. How about you?

    • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Monday September 23 2019, @07:31PM

      by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Monday September 23 2019, @07:31PM (#897748) Journal
      I removed it from mine because it sucked - had nothing to do with the NSA, just that it wasn't worth the hassle.
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