systemd System and Service Manager
+CHANGES WITH 219:
+
+ * Introduce a new API "sd-hwdb.h" for querying the hardware
+ metadata database. With this minimal interface one can query
+ and enumerate the udev hwdb, decoupled from the old libudev
+ library. libudev's interface for this is now only a wrapper
+ around sd-hwdb. A new tool systemd-hwdb has been added to
+ interface with and update the database.
+
+ * When any of systemd's tools copies files (for example due to
+ tmpfiles' C lines) a btrfs reflink will attempted first,
+ before bytewise copying is done.
+
+ * systemd-nspawn gained a new --ephemeral switch. When
+ specified a btrfs snapshot is taken of the container's root
+ directory, and immediately removed when the container
+ terminates again. Thus, a container can be started whose
+ changes never alter the container's root directory, and are
+ lost on container termination. This switch can also be used
+ for starting a container off the root file system of the
+ host without affecting the host OS. This switch is only
+ available on btrfs file systems.
+
+ * systemd-nspawn gained a new --template= switch. It takes the
+ path to a container tree to use as template for the tree
+ specified via --directory=, should that directory be
+ missing. This allows instantiating containers dynamically,
+ on first run. This switch is only available on btrfs file
+ systems.
+
+ * When a .mount unit refers to a mount point on which multiple
+ mounts are stacked, and the .mount unit is stopped all of
+ the stacked mount points will now be unmounted until no
+ mount point remains.
+
+ * systemd now has an explicit notion of supported and
+ unsupported unit types. Jobs enqueued for unsupported unit
+ types will now fail with an "unsupported" error code. More
+ specifically .swap, .automount and .device units are not
+ supported in containers, .busname units are not supported on
+ non-kdbus systems. .swap and .automount are also not
+ supported if their respective kernel compile time options
+ are disabled.
+
+ * machinectl gained support for two new "copy-from" and
+ "copy-to" commands for copying files from a running
+ container to the host or vice versa.
+
+ * machinectl gained support for a new "bind" command to bind
+ mount host directories into local containers. This is
+ currently only supported for nspawn containers.
+
+ * networkd gained support for configuring bridge forwarding
+ database entries (fdb) from .network files.
+
+ * A new tiny daemon "systemd-importd" has been added that can
+ download container images in tar, raw, qcow2 or dkr formats,
+ and make them available locally in /var/lib/machines, so
+ that they can run as nspawn containers. The daemon can GPG
+ verify the downloads (not supported for dkr, since it has no
+ provisions for verifying downloads). It will transparently
+ decompress bz2, xz, gzip compressed downloads if necessary,
+ and restore sparse files on disk. The daemon uses privilege
+ separation to ensure the actual download logic runs with
+ fewer privileges than the deamon itself. machinectl has
+ gained new commands "pull-tar", "pull-raw" and "pull-dkr" to
+ make the functionality of importd available to the
+ user. With this in place the Fedora and Ubuntu "Cloud"
+ images can be downloaded and booted as containers unmodified
+ (the Fedora images lack the appropriate GPG signature files
+ currently, so they cannot be verified, but this will change
+ soon, hopefully). Note that downloading images is currently
+ only fully supported on btrfs.
+
+ * machinectl is now able to list container images found in
+ /var/lib/machines, along with some metadata about sizes of
+ disk and similar. If the directory is located on btrfs and
+ quota is enabled, this includes quota display. A new command
+ "image-status" has been added that shows additional
+ information about images.
+
+ * machinectl is now able to clone container images
+ efficiently, if the underlying file system (btrfs) supports
+ it, with the new "machinectl list-images" command. It also
+ gained commands for renaming and removing images, as well as
+ marking them read-only or read-write (supported also on
+ legacy file systems).
+
+ * networkd gained support for collecting LLDP network
+ announcements, from hardware that supports this. This is
+ shown in networkctl output.
+
+ * systemd-run gained support for a new -t (--pty) switch for
+ invoking a binary on a pty whose input and output is
+ connected to the invoking terminal. This allows executing
+ processes as system services while interactively
+ communicating with them via the terminal. Most interestingly
+ this is supported across container boundaries. Invoking
+ "systemd-run -t /bin/bash" is an alternative to running a
+ full login session, the difference being that the former
+ will not register a session, nor go through the PAM session
+ setup.
+
+ * tmpfiles gained support for a new "v" line type for creating
+ btrfs subvolumes. If the underlying file system is a legacy
+ file system, this automatically degrades to creating a
+ normal directory. Among others /var/lib/machines is now
+ created like this at boot, should it be missing.
+
+ * The directory /var/lib/containers/ has been deprecated and
+ been replaced by /var/lib/machines. The term "machines" has
+ been used in the systemd context as generic term for both
+ VMs and containers, and hence appears more appropriate for
+ this, as the directory can also contain raw images bootable
+ via qemu/kvm.
+
+ * systemd-nspawn when invoked with -M but without --directory=
+ or --image= is now capable of searching for the container
+ root directory, subvolume or disk image automatically, in
+ /var/lib/machines. systemd-nspawn@.service has been updated
+ to make use of this, thus allowing it to be used for raw
+ disk images, too.
+
+ * A new machines.target unit has been introduced that is
+ supposed to group all containers/VMs invoked as services on
+ the system. systemd-nspawn@.service has been updated to
+ integrate with that.
+
+ * machinectl gained a new "start" command, for invoking a
+ container as a service. "machinectl start foo" is mostly
+ equivalent to "systemctl start systemd-nspawn@foo.service",
+ but handles escaping in a nicer way.
+
+ * systemd-nspawn will now mount most of the cgroupfs tree
+ read-only into each container, with the exception of the
+ container's own subtree in the name=systemd hierarchy.
+
+ * journald now sets the special FS_NOCOW file flag for its
+ journal files. This should improve performance on btrfs, by
+ avoiding heavy fragmentation when journald's write-pattern
+ is used on COW file systems. It degrades btrfs' data
+ integrity guarantees for the files to the same levels as for
+ ext3/ext4 however. This should be OK though as journald does
+ its own data integrity checks and all its objects are
+ checksummed on disk. Also, journald should handle btrfs disk
+ full events a lot more gracefully now, by processing SIGBUS
+ errors, and not relying on fallocate() anymore.
+
+ * When journald detects that journal files it is writing to
+ have been deleted it will immediately start new journal
+ files.
+
+ * systemd now provides a way to store file descriptors
+ per-service in PID 1.This is useful for daemons to ensure
+ that fds they require are not lost during a daemon
+ restart. The fds are passed to the deamon on the next
+ invocation in the same way socket activation fds are
+ passed. This is now used by journald to ensure that the
+ various sockets connected to all the system's stdout/stderr
+ are not lost when journald is restarted. File descriptors
+ may be stored in PID 1 via the sd_pid_notify_with_fds() API,
+ an extension to sd_notify(). Note that a limit is enforced
+ on the number of fds a service can store in PID 1, and it
+ defaults to 0, so that no fds may be stored, unless this is
+ explicitly turned on.
+
+ * The default TERM variable to use for units connected to a
+ terminal, when no other value is explicitly is set is now
+ vt220 rather than vt102. This should be fairly safe still,
+ but allows PgUp/PgDn work.
+
+ * The /etc/crypttab option header= as known from Debian is now
+ supported.
+
+ * "loginctl user-status" and "loginctl session-status" will
+ now show the last 10 lines of log messages of the
+ user/session following the status output. Similar,
+ "machinectl status" will show the last 10 log lines
+ associated with a virtual machine or container
+ service. (Note that this is usually not the log messages
+ done in the VM/container itself, but simply what the
+ container manager logs. For nspawn this includes all console
+ output however.)
+
+ * "loginctl session-status" without further argument will now
+ show the status of the session of the caller. Similar,
+ "lock-session", "unlock-session", "activate",
+ "enable-linger", "disable-linger" may now be called without
+ session/user parameter in which case they apply to the
+ caller's session/user.
+
+ * An X11 session scriptlet is now shipped that uploads
+ $DISPLAY and $XAUTHORITY into the environment of the systemd
+ --user daemon if a session begins. This should improve
+ compatibility with X11 enabled applications run as systemd
+ user services.
+
+ * Generators are now subject to masking via /etc and /run, the
+ same way as unit files.
+
+ * networkd .network files gained support for configuring
+ per-link IPv4/IPv6 packet forwarding as well as IPv4
+ masquerading. This is by default turned on for veth links to
+ containers, as registered by systemd-nspawn. This means that
+ nspawn containers run with --network-veth will now get
+ automatic routed access to the host's networks without any
+ further configuration or setup, as long as networkd runs on
+ the host.
+
+ * systemd-nspawn gained the --port= (-p) switch to expose TCP
+ or UDP posts of a container on the host. With this in place
+ it is possible to run containers with private veth links
+ (--network-veth), and have their functionality exposed on
+ the host as if their services were running directly on the
+ host.
+
+ * systemd-nspawn's --network-veth switch now gained a short
+ version "-n", since with the changes above it is now truly
+ useful out-of-the-box. The systemd-nspawn@.service has been
+ updated to make use of it too by default.
+
+ * systemd-nspawn will now maintain a per-image R/W lock, to
+ ensure that the same image is not started more than once
+ writable. (It's OK to run an image multiple times
+ simultaneously in read-only mode.)
+
+ * systemd-nspawn's --image= option is now capable of
+ dissecting and booting MBR and GPT disk images that contain
+ only a single active Linux partition. Previously it
+ supported only GPT disk images with proper GPT type
+ IDs. This allows running cloud images from major
+ distributions directly with systemd-nspawn, without
+ modification.
+
+ * In addition to collecting mouse dpi data in the udev
+ hardware database, there's now support for collecting angle
+ information for mouse scroll wheels. The database is
+ supposed to guarantee similar scrolling behavior on mice
+ that it knows about. There's also support for collecting
+ information about Touchpad types.
+
+ * udev's input_id built-in will now also collect touch screen
+ dimension data and attach it to probed devices.
+
+ * /etc/os-release gained support for a Distribution Privacy
+ Policy link field.
+
+ * networkd gained support for creating "ipvlan", "gretap",
+ "ip6gre", "ip6gretap" and "ip6tnl" network devices.
+
+ * systemd-tmpfiles gained support for "a" lines for setting
+ ACLs on files.
+
+ * systemd-nspawn will now mount /tmp in the container to
+ tmpfs, automatically.
+
+ * systemd now exposes the memory.usage_in_bytes cgroup
+ attribute and shows it for each service in the "systemctl
+ status" output, if available.
+
+ * When the user presses Ctrl-Alt-Del more than 7x within 2s an
+ immediate reboot is triggered. This useful if shutdown is
+ hung and is unable to complete, to expedite the
+ operation. Note that this kind of reboot will still unmount
+ all file systems, and hence should not result in fsck being
+ run on next reboot.
+
+ * A .device unit for an optical block device will now be
+ considered active only when a medium is in the drive. Also,
+ mount units are now bound to their backing devices thus
+ triggering automatic unmounting when devices become
+ unavailable. With this in place systemd will now
+ automatically unmount left-over mounts when a CD-ROM is
+ ejected or an USB stick is yanked from the system.
+
+ * networkd-wait-online now has support for waiting for
+ specific interfaces only (with globbing), and for giving up
+ after a configurable timeout.
+
+ * networkd now exits when idle. It will be automatically
+ restarted as soon as interfaces show up, are removed or
+ change state. networkd will stay around as long as there is
+ at least one DHCP state machine or similar around, that keep
+ it non-idle.
+
+ * networkd may now configure IPv6 link-local addressing in
+ addition to IPv4 link-local addressing.
+
+ * The IPv6 "token" for use in SLAAC may now be configured for
+ each .network interface in networkd.
+
+ * Routes configured with networkd may now be assigned a scope
+ in .network files.
+
+ * networkd's [Match] sections now support globbing and lists
+ of multiple space-separated matches per item.
+
+ Contributions from: Alban Crequy, Alin Rauta, Andrey Chaser,
+ Bastien Nocera, Bruno Bottazzini, Carlos Garnacho, Carlos
+ Morata Castillo, Chris Atkinson, Chris J. Arges, Christian
+ Kirbach, Christian Seiler, Christoph Brill, Colin Guthrie,
+ Colin Walters, Cristian Rodríguez, Daniele Medri, Daniel Mack,
+ Dave Reisner, David Herrmann, Djalal Harouni, Erik Auerswald,
+ Filipe Brandenburger, Frank Theile, Gabor Kelemen, Gabriel de
+ Perthuis, Harald Hoyer, Hui Wang, Ivan Shapovalov, Jan
+ Engelhardt, Jan Synacek, Jay Faulkner, Johannes Hölzl, Jonas
+ Ådahl, Jonathan Boulle, Josef Andersson, Kay Sievers, Ken
+ Werner, Lennart Poettering, Lucas De Marchi, Lukas Märdian,
+ Lukas Nykryn, Lukasz Skalski, Luke Shumaker, Mantas Mikulėnas,
+ Manuel Mendez, Marcel Holtmann, Marc Schmitzer, Marko
+ Myllynen, Martin Pitt, Maxim Mikityanskiy, Michael Biebl,
+ Michael Marineau, Michael Olbrich, Michal Schmidt, Mindaugas
+ Baranauskas, Moez Bouhlel, Naveen Kumar, Patrik Flykt, Paul
+ Martin, Peter Hutterer, Peter Mattern, Philippe De Swert,
+ Piotr Drąg, Rafael Ferreira, Rami Rosen, Robert Milasan, Ronny
+ Chevalier, Sangjung Woo, Sebastien Bacher, Sergey Ptashnick,
+ Shawn Landden, Stéphane Graber, Susant Sahani, Sylvain
+ Plantefève, Thomas Hindoe Paaboel Andersen, Tim JP, Tom
+ Gundersen, Topi Miettinen, Torstein Husebø, Umut Tezduyar
+ Lindskog, Veres Lajos, Vincent Batts, WaLyong Cho, Wieland
+ Hoffmann, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek
+
+ -- Berlin, 2015-02-16
+
CHANGES WITH 218:
* When querying unit file enablement status (for example via
~ianmdlvl / elogind.git / blobdiff