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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 rleigh on Sunday September 22 2019, @10:14PM
I don't think mtab is a good example, because it's outdated. I eliminated mtab in Debian around 8 years back now, along with the util-linux maintainer who made it use procfs for everything. resolv.conf is fair enough; though most modern distributions make it a symlink. Overall, the direction has been to remove these special-case writable files from /etc and put them in /var or similar, making it possible to have only readonly state in /etc. However, some software, like CUPS, does like to rewrite its configuration in /etc; IMO these services should be putting that dynamic configuration into /var.