Introduction
systemd is a system and service manager for Linux, compatible with SysV and LSB init scripts. systemd provides aggressive parallelization capabilities, uses socket and D-Bus activation for starting services, offers on-demand starting of daemons, keeps track of processes using Linux cgroups, supports snapshotting and restoring of the system state, maintains mount and automount points and implements an elaborate transactional dependency-based service control logic. It can work as a drop-in replacement for sysvinit.
Installation
Tollef packaged a very first systemd package as (0~git+20100605+dfd8ee-1) and pushed it to experimental. Currently v11 is in the official repositories and v12 is on its road. systemd requires dbus from upstream, means you need dbus >=1.4.0, which can also be found in experimental. You have to enhance your sources.list and add experimental Distribution.
To install systemd (and dbus) from experimental:
apt-get update apt-get install -t experimental dbus systemd
Known Issues and Bugs
#603710: root and swap devices on lvm do not correctly show up in udev (missing symlinks)
As sysvinit is default and has "Essential flag" set, it will always be preferred on upgrades (workaround: put systemd-sysv on hold). For more Details see chapters "3.8 Essential packages" and "5.6.9 Essential"
- util-linux-ng has /sbin/agetty, Debian has renamed agetty to getty in its util-linux package (will be fixed for wheezy by Debian maintainer)
Upstream systemd >=v12 requires libnotify 0.7 - this needs a revert as it is not available in Debian yet
Use native mount
With v12 you can use native (means systemd's) mount by activating it in /etc/systemd/system.conf.
egrep 'MountAuto|SwapAuto' /etc/systemd/system.conf Output: MountAuto=yes SwapAuto=yes
Who is who?
Maintainer of the systemd package is Tollef Fog Heen (Mithrandir). Currently, it's discussed to get Michael Biebl (mbiebl) as co-maintainer.
Where to get help?
As systemd is a very young project (see [1]), we would appreciate to use the exisiting upstream infrastructure like mailing-list [2], IRC and read Lennart's blog [3], etc. for following the development. Most people interested in systemd development (from diverse distributions) and Debian-specific packaging are around on IRC: #systemd (irc.freenode.net). Anyway, Debian-specific bugs should be sent to Debian-BTS (for example use report-bug tool).
[1] http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html
[2] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel