systemd

systemd merged optional Rust support for new leaf programs on 2026-10-24: Meson not Cargo, no_std, core libraries stay C for now. It is in the 263 development branch; project pages disagree on binary sizes and Meson version.

systemd 262 lets the init system build as a single static binary for tiny containers and adds Linux 6.17 kernel coredump-socket support plus OpenSSL 4.

systemd merged a rule requiring AI coding agents to insert a manual-review marker into README.md before any other work, so maintainers can spot pull requests an AI author never actually looked at.

The final systemd 261 release adds systemd-tpm2-swtpm, a software TPM fallback for hardware without a TPM chip, and graduates systemd-sysupdate and a new networkd DHCP-relay backend.

systemd 261-rc1 adds systemd-sysinstall, an IMDS subsystem, a storagectl tool, and PID1 support for the kernel's Live Update Orchestration and Kexec Handover.

Systemd 260 removes SysV init script support, introduces OverlayFS-based mstack container tooling, adds a Varlink metrics framework, and raises the minimum kernel to Linux 5.10.