1 systemd System and Service Manager
4 http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html
7 https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd
10 git@github.com:systemd/systemd.git
11 https://github.com/systemd/systemd
14 https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel
17 #systemd on irc.freenode.org
20 https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues
28 LGPLv2.1+ for all code
29 - except src/basic/MurmurHash2.c which is Public Domain
30 - except src/basic/siphash24.c which is CC0 Public Domain
31 - except src/journal/lookup3.c which is Public Domain
32 - except src/udev/* which is (currently still) GPLv2, GPLv2+
33 - except tools/chromiumos/* which is BSD-style
37 Linux kernel >= 4.2 for unified cgroup hierarchy support
39 Kernel Config Options:
41 CONFIG_CGROUPS (it is OK to disable all controllers)
49 CONFIG_FHANDLE (libudev, mount and bind mount handling)
51 Kernel crypto/hash API
52 CONFIG_CRYPTO_USER_API_HASH
56 udev will fail to work with the legacy sysfs layout:
57 CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED=n
59 Legacy hotplug slows down the system and confuses udev:
60 CONFIG_UEVENT_HELPER_PATH=""
62 Userspace firmware loading is not supported and should
63 be disabled in the kernel:
64 CONFIG_FW_LOADER_USER_HELPER=n
66 Some udev rules and virtualization detection relies on it:
69 Support for some SCSI devices serial number retrieval, to
70 create additional symlinks in /dev/disk/ and /dev/tape:
73 Required for PrivateNetwork= in service units:
75 Note that systemd-localed.service and other systemd units use
76 PrivateNetwork so this is effectively required.
78 Required for PrivateUsers= in service units:
81 Optional but strongly recommended:
85 CONFIG_{TMPFS,EXT4_FS,XFS,BTRFS_FS,...}_POSIX_ACL
87 CONFIG_SECCOMP_FILTER (required for seccomp support)
88 CONFIG_CHECKPOINT_RESTORE (for the kcmp() syscall)
90 Required for CPUShares= in resource control unit settings
92 CONFIG_FAIR_GROUP_SCHED
94 Required for CPUQuota= in resource control unit settings
97 Required for IPAddressDeny= and IPAddressAllow= in resource control
105 We recommend to turn off Real-Time group scheduling in the
106 kernel when using systemd. RT group scheduling effectively
107 makes RT scheduling unavailable for most userspace, since it
108 requires explicit assignment of RT budgets to each unit whose
109 processes making use of RT. As there's no sensible way to
110 assign these budgets automatically this cannot really be
111 fixed, and it's best to disable group scheduling hence.
112 CONFIG_RT_GROUP_SCHED=n
114 It's a good idea to disable the implicit creation of networking bonding
115 devices by the kernel networking bonding module, so that the
116 automatically created "bond0" interface doesn't conflict with any such
117 device created by systemd-networkd (or other tools). Ideally there
118 would be a kernel compile-time option for this, but there currently
119 isn't. The next best thing is to make this change through a modprobe.d
120 drop-in. This is shipped by default, see modprobe.d/systemd.conf.
122 Required for systemd-nspawn:
123 CONFIG_DEVPTS_MULTIPLE_INSTANCES or Linux kernel >= 4.7
125 Note that kernel auditing is broken when used with systemd's
126 container code. When using systemd in conjunction with
127 containers, please make sure to either turn off auditing at
128 runtime using the kernel command line option "audit=0", or
129 turn it off at kernel compile time using:
131 If systemd is compiled with libseccomp support on
132 architectures which do not use socketcall() and where seccomp
133 is supported (this effectively means x86-64 and ARM, but
134 excludes 32-bit x86!), then nspawn will now install a
135 work-around seccomp filter that makes containers boot even
136 with audit being enabled. This works correctly only on kernels
137 3.14 and newer though. TL;DR: turn audit off, still.
141 libmount >= 2.30 (from util-linux)
142 (util-linux *must* be built without --enable-libmount-support-mtab)
143 libseccomp >= 2.3.1 (optional)
144 libblkid >= 2.24 (from util-linux) (optional)
145 libkmod >= 15 (optional)
146 PAM >= 1.1.2 (optional)
147 libcryptsetup (optional)
150 libselinux (optional)
152 liblz4 >= 1.3.0 / 130 (optional)
154 libqrencode (optional)
155 libmicrohttpd (optional)
157 libidn2 or libidn (optional)
158 gnutls >= 3.1.4 (optional, >= 3.6.0 is required to support DNS-over-TLS with gnutls)
159 openssl >= 1.1.0 (optional, required to support DNS-over-TLS with openssl)
160 elfutils >= 158 (optional)
162 tzdata >= 2014f (optional)
165 docbook-xsl (optional, required for documentation)
166 xsltproc (optional, required for documentation)
167 python-lxml (optional, required to build the indices)
169 meson >= 0.46 (>= 0.49 is required to build position-independent executables)
171 gcc, awk, sed, grep, m4, and similar tools
173 During runtime, you need the following additional
176 util-linux >= v2.27.1 required
177 dbus >= 1.4.0 (strictly speaking optional, but recommended)
178 NOTE: If using dbus < 1.9.18, you should override the default
179 policy directory (--with-dbuspolicydir=/etc/dbus-1/system.d).
183 To build in directory build/:
184 meson build/ && ninja -C build
186 Any configuration options can be specified as -Darg=value... arguments
187 to meson. After the build directory is initially configured, meson will
188 refuse to run again, and options must be changed with:
189 mesonconf -Darg=value...
190 mesonconf without any arguments will print out available options and
191 their current values.
197 DESTDIR=... ninja install
199 A tarball can be created with:
200 git archive --format=tar --prefix=systemd-222/ v222 | xz > systemd-222.tar.xz
202 When systemd-hostnamed is used, it is strongly recommended to
203 install nss-myhostname to ensure that, in a world of
204 dynamically changing hostnames, the hostname stays resolvable
205 under all circumstances. In fact, systemd-hostnamed will warn
206 if nss-myhostname is not installed.
208 nss-systemd must be enabled on systemd systems, as that's required for
209 DynamicUser= to work. Note that we ship services out-of-the-box that
210 make use of DynamicUser= now, hence enabling nss-systemd is not
213 Note that the build prefix for systemd must be /usr. (Moreover,
214 packages systemd relies on — such as D-Bus — really should use the same
215 prefix, otherwise you are on your own.) -Dsplit-usr=false (which is the
216 default and does not need to be specified) is the recommended setting,
217 and -Dsplit-usr=true should be used on systems which have /usr on a
220 Additional packages are necessary to run some tests:
221 - busybox (used by test/TEST-13-NSPAWN-SMOKE)
222 - nc (used by test/TEST-12-ISSUE-3171)
224 - python3-evdev (used by hwdb parsing tests)
225 - strace (used by test/test-functions)
226 - capsh (optional, used by test-execute)
229 Default udev rules use the following standard system group
230 names, which need to be resolvable by getgrnam() at any time,
231 even in the very early boot stages, where no other databases
232 and network are available:
234 audio, cdrom, dialout, disk, input, kmem, kvm, lp, render, tape, tty, video
236 During runtime, the journal daemon requires the
237 "systemd-journal" system group to exist. New journal files will
238 be readable by this group (but not writable), which may be used
239 to grant specific users read access. In addition, system
240 groups "wheel" and "adm" will be given read-only access to
241 journal files using systemd-tmpfiles.service.
243 The journal remote daemon requires the
244 "systemd-journal-remote" system user and group to
245 exist. During execution this network facing service will drop
246 privileges and assume this uid/gid for security reasons.
248 Similarly, the network management daemon requires the
249 "systemd-network" system user and group to exist.
251 Similarly, the name resolution daemon requires the
252 "systemd-resolve" system user and group to exist.
254 Similarly, the coredump support requires the
255 "systemd-coredump" system user and group to exist.
258 systemd ships with four glibc NSS modules:
260 nss-myhostname resolves the local hostname to locally
261 configured IP addresses, as well as "localhost" to
264 nss-resolve enables DNS resolution via the systemd-resolved
265 DNS/LLMNR caching stub resolver "systemd-resolved".
267 nss-mymachines enables resolution of all local containers registered
268 with machined to their respective IP addresses. It also maps UID/GIDs
269 ranges used by containers to useful names.
271 nss-systemd enables resolution of all dynamically allocated service
272 users. (See the DynamicUser= setting in unit files.)
274 To make use of these NSS modules, please add them to the "hosts:",
275 "passwd:" and "group:" lines in /etc/nsswitch.conf. The "resolve"
276 module should replace the glibc "dns" module in this file (and don't
277 worry, it chain-loads the "dns" module if it can't talk to resolved).
279 The four modules should be used in the following order:
281 passwd: compat mymachines systemd
282 group: compat mymachines systemd
283 hosts: files mymachines resolve [!UNAVAIL=return] dns myhostname
286 When calling "systemctl enable/disable/is-enabled" on a unit which is a
287 SysV init.d script, it calls /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-sysv-install;
288 this needs to translate the action into the distribution specific
289 mechanism such as chkconfig or update-rc.d. Packagers need to provide
290 this script if you need this functionality (you don't if you disabled
293 Please see src/systemctl/systemd-sysv-install.SKELETON for how this
294 needs to look like, and provide an implementation at the marked places.
297 systemd will warn during early boot if /usr is not already mounted at
298 this point (that means: either located on the same file system as / or
299 already mounted in the initrd). While in systemd itself very little
300 will break if /usr is on a separate, late-mounted partition, many of
301 its dependencies very likely will break sooner or later in one form or
302 another. For example, udev rules tend to refer to binaries in /usr,
303 binaries that link to libraries in /usr or binaries that refer to data
304 files in /usr. Since these breakages are not always directly visible,
305 systemd will warn about this, since this kind of file system setup is
306 not really supported anymore by the basic set of Linux OS components.
308 systemd requires that the /run mount point exists. systemd also
309 requires that /var/run is a symlink to /run.
311 For more information on this issue consult
312 https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/separate-usr-is-broken
314 To run systemd under valgrind, compile with meson option
315 -Dvalgrind=true and have valgrind development headers installed
316 (i.e. valgrind-devel or equivalent). Otherwise, false positives will be
317 triggered by code which violates some rules but is actually safe. Note
318 that valgrind generates nice output only on exit(), hence on shutdown
319 we don't execve() systemd-shutdown.
321 STABLE BRANCHES AND BACKPORTS:
322 Stable branches with backported patches are available in the
323 systemd-stable repo at https://github.com/systemd/systemd-stable.
325 Stable branches are started for certain releases of systemd and named
326 after them, e.g. v238-stable. Stable branches are managed by
327 distribution maintainers on an as needed basis. See
328 https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/Backports/ for some
329 more information and examples.
331 ENGINEERING AND CONSULTING SERVICES:
332 Kinvolk (https://kinvolk.io) offers professional engineering
333 and consulting services for systemd. Please contact Chris Kühl
334 <chris@kinvolk.io> for more information.