New RHEL Systemd Version.

With the upcoming RHEL 7.2 version, Systemd should be upgraded, going from version 208 to 219.

This Systemd upgrade decision was taken according to Lukáš Nykrýn from Red Hat because “it is really difficult and risky to backport patches from newer version to our current 208 and we have a lot of request for new features from users”.

Today, you’ve got two solutions to experiment this new version:

• either install the Fedora 22 distribution on a PC or a virtual machine after downloading the 64-Bit 2.1GB installation image,
• or install a RHEL 7/CentOS 7 distribution, configure the EPEL repository, follow Lukáš Nykrýn’s instructions and update the distribution:

  # yum install -y epel-release
  # cd /etc/yum.repos.d
  # wget "https://copr.fedoraproject.org/coprs/lnykryn/systemd/repo/epel-7/lnykryn-systemd-epel-7.repo"
  # yum -y update

You can now check the new Systemd version:

# systemctl --version
systemd 219
+PAM +AUDIT +SELINUX +IMA -APPARMOR +SMACK +SYSVINIT +UTMP +LIBCRYPTSETUP +GCRYPT +GNUTLS +ACL +XZ -LZ4 -SECCOMP +BLKID +ELFUTILS +KMOD +IDN

According to the 2015 Red Hat Summit Systemd Presentation, this version brings the following new features:

• systemctl: new edit and cat options
• CPUQuota: “cap” CPU usage for services
• systemd-socket-proxy: add socket activation to daemons that don’t support it natively
• systemd-nspawn: improvements on networking, container management, etc
• systemd-networkd: DHCP server/client, bridge, bond, vlan, vxlan, macvlan, tun configuration management

Happy testing!