{"id":103002,"date":"2025-11-20T11:13:26","date_gmt":"2025-11-20T11:13:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mailinvest.blog\/index.php\/2025\/11\/20\/systemd-259-release-candidate-flexes-musl-support-the-register\/"},"modified":"2025-11-20T11:14:32","modified_gmt":"2025-11-20T11:14:32","slug":"systemd-259-release-candidate-flexes-musl-support-the-register","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mailinvest.blog\/index.php\/2025\/11\/20\/systemd-259-release-candidate-flexes-musl-support-the-register\/","title":{"rendered":"Systemd 259 release candidate flexes musl support \u2022 The Register"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Together with new performance, systemd is broadening its distro assist even additional, which is able to absolutely delight members of the broader Linux neighborhood.<\/p>\n

Systemd v259-rc1<\/a> is the primary preview launch of what would be the subsequent model of essentially the most extensively used system and repair supervisor within the Linux world. It’s also, in fact, essentially the most controversial, and a few of the modifications on this model additional widen systemd’s scope \u2013 which we suspect will provoke some push-back, however in all probability will not decelerate its adoption or development.<\/p>\n

For some readers, the final entry within the NEWS<\/code> file could possibly be seen as essentially the most important half:<\/p>\n

It does, nevertheless, include important practical restrictions:<\/p>\n

What this implies is that it is now doable to compile and run systemd on Linux distributions that aren’t primarily based on the GNU model of the C normal library, glibc<\/a>. Along with glibc, there’s now preliminary assist for the primary various libc of the Linux world, musl<\/a>, as utilized in a variety of light-weight distros comparable to Alpine Linux<\/a>, Ad\u00e9lie Linux<\/a>, and Void Linux<\/a>, which, regardless of The Register’s<\/em> coverage of its maintainer problems<\/a> in 2018, remains to be trundling alongside fortunately.<\/p>\n

The explanation that the practical restrictions won’t matter an excessive amount of is that the driving pressure behind this\u00a0change is that postmarketOS<\/a>, a venture to supply a FOSS lifeline to smartphones not supported by their distributors, which we looked at a few years ago<\/a>, introduced final yr that it was switching to systemd<\/a> to raised assist the fondleslab variations of GNOME and KDE Plasma. PostmarketOS relies on Alpine Linux, and Alpine is constructed round musl, so the postmarketOS builders\u00a0submitted some code<\/a> to permit systemd to compile towards musl as an alternative of glibc. Earlier this week, Pink Hat’s Zbigniew J\u0119drzejewski-Szmek<\/a> merged it, commenting<\/a>:<\/p>\n

We suspect that these guarded reservations are why the 259-rc1 NEWS file rigorously says:<\/p>\n

To which Achill Gilgenast<\/a>, an Alpine and Postmarket developer, replied<\/a>:<\/p>\n

(Of us new to this web lark could not know however “FWIW” means “for what it is value.”)<\/p>\n

There are a bunch of different practical modifications, as these watching the progress of systemd over time may count on. Its out-of-memory killer, systemd-oomd<\/code>, has been revised in a number of areas, and it now experiences extra monitoring info, which ought to assist with debugging. A couple of years again, this module acquired a reputation<\/a> for being overly aggressive<\/a>, so extra instrumentation is sweet.<\/p>\n

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