non-transient services (i.e. those defined with unit files on disk)
we will continue to default to Type=simple.
+ * The Linux kernel's current default RLIMIT_NOFILE resource limit for
+ userspace processes is set to 1024 (soft) and 4096
+ (hard). Previously, systemd passed this on unmodified to all
+ processes it forked off. With this systemd release the hard limit
+ systemd passes on is increased to 256K, overriding the kernel's
+ defaults and substantially increasing the number of simultaneous file
+ descriptors unprivileged userspace processes can allocate. Note that
+ the soft limit remains at 1024 for compatibility reasons: the
+ traditional UNIX select() call cannot deal with file descriptors >=
+ 1024 and increasing the soft limit globally might thus result in
+ programs unexpectedly allocating a high file descriptor and thus
+ failing abnormally when attempting to use it with select() (of
+ course, programs shouldn't use select() anymore, and prefer
+ poll()/epoll, but the call unfortunately remains undeservedly popular
+ at this time). This change reflects the fact that file descriptor
+ handling in the Linux kernel has been optimized in more recent
+ kernels and allocating large numbers of them should be much cheaper
+ both in memory and in performance than it used to be. Programs that
+ want to take benefit of the increased limit have to "opt-in" into
+ high file descriptors explicitly by setting their soft limit to the
+ hard limit during initialization. Of course, when doing that they
+ must do this acknowledging the fact that they cannot use select()
+ anymore (and neither can any shared library they use — or any shared
+ library used by any shared library they use and so on).
+
+ * The fs.nr_open and fs.file-max sysctls are now automatically bumped
+ to the highest possible values, as separate accounting of file
+ descriptors is no longer necessary, as memcg tracks them correctly as
+ part of the memory accounting anyway. Thus, from the four limits on
+ file descriptors currently enforced (fs.file-max, fs.nr_open,
+ RLIMIT_NOFILE hard, RLIMIT_NOFILE soft) we turn off the first two,
+ and keep only the latter two. A set of build-time options
+ (-Dbump-proc-sys-fs-file-max=no and -Dbump-proc-sys-fs-nr-open=no)
+ has been added to revert this change in behaviour, which might be
+ an option for systems that turn off memcg in the kernel.
+
+ * When no /etc/locale.conf file exists (and hence no locale settings
+ are in place), systemd will now use the "C.UTF-8" locale by default,
+ and set LANG= to it. This locale is supported by various
+ distributions including Fedora, with clear indications that upstream
+ glibc is going to make it available too. This locale enables UTF-8
+ mode by default, which appears appropriate for 2018.
+
CHANGES WITH 239:
* NETWORK INTERFACE DEVICE NAMING CHANGES: systemd-udevd's "net_id"
different from what the documentation said, and not particularly
useful, as repeated systemd-tmpfiles invocations would not be
idempotent and grow such files without bounds. With this release
- behaviour has been altered slightly, to match what the documentation
- says: lines of this type only have an effect if the indicated files
- don't exist yet, and only then the argument string is written to the
- file.
+ behaviour has been altered to match what the documentation says:
+ lines of this type only have an effect if the indicated files don't
+ exist yet, and only then the argument string is written to the file.
* FUTURE INCOMPATIBILITY: In systemd v238 we intend to slightly change
systemd-tmpfiles behaviour: previously, read-only files owned by root