systemd 261 Released With New systemd-sysinstall OS Installer, IMDSD & Storagectl - Phoronix

Articles & Reviews

News Archive

Forums

Premium Ad-Free<br>Contact

Popular Categories

Close

Articles & Reviews

News Archive

Forums

Premium

Contact

Categories

Computers Display Drivers Graphics Cards Linux Gaming Memory Motherboards Processors Software Storage Operating Systems Peripherals

systemd 261 Released With New systemd-sysinstall OS Installer, IMDSD & Storagectl

Written by Michael Larabel in systemd on 19 June 2026 at 02:28 PM EDT. 28 Comments

Systemd 261 is out as stable today with a number of new features and ready to coincide with H2'2026 Linux distributions.

The systemd 261 release is out today with a host of new features and capabilities for this Linux init system and service manager and a lot more. As covered previously on Phoronix, some of the interesting additions with systemd 261 include:

- A new subsystem with systemd 261 is the Instance Metadata Service "IMDS". This includes the new systemd-imdsd that makes IMDS services accessible to local programs. There is also a hardware database for recognizing established public clouds via SMBIOS information such as for Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, Google COmpute Engine, Oracle Cloud, Tencent Cloud, Hetzner, and others. This makes for a nice unified way of accessing virtual machine metadata from systemd.

- Systemd 261 is also introducing storagectl as a new command-line tool and Varlink interface for exposing storage resources in a unified manner for use as managed user storage.

- There is also now systemd-sysinstall that provides a simple, modern textual installer for an OS. This wraps around systemd's partitioning capabilities, credential management, and other system management functionality while copying the OS from a temporary boot medium like a USB drive.

- A new service systemd-tpm2-swtpm.service for running the IBM Software TPM "swtpm" for an automatic fallback on systems that lack a pysical TPM but where TPM functionality should be made available.

- A new tmpfiles.d/root.conf for ensuring that root directory permissions get set to 0555.

- PID1 now supports the Linux kernel's Live Update Orchestrator "LUO" and Kernel Handover "KHO" capabilities.

- User session managers now support persisting user units' FD Stores

- A new unit setting of CPUSetPartition= allows for configuring the CPU set cgroup partition type such as root, isolated, or member for systemd services.

- There is a new setting of RestrictFileSystemAccess= that leverages a BPF LSM program for restricting execution to only binaries that are stored on a signed and verified DM-VERITY protected file-system.

- New Varlink methods for the systemd manager interface for requesting system shutdown.

- DefaultMemoryZSwapWriteback= is a new manager setting for a system-wide default of the Zswap writeback setting over the existing per-unit setting.

- Individual binaries now embedding the dlopen ELF metadata note.

Systemd 261 source downloads and more details on the dozens of changes in full via GitHub.

28 Comments

Tweet

systemd 261-rc3 Released With Individual Binaries Now Embedding dlopen ELF Metadata Note<br>systemd 261-rc1 Released With OS Installer, IMDS Subsystem & New storagectl<br>systemd 260 Released: mstack, SysV Service Scripts Removed & AI Agents Documentation<br>systemd 260-rc3 Released With AI Agents Documentation Added<br>systemd 260-rc2 Released With More Changes<br>systemd 260-rc1 Released: New "mstack" Feature, System V Service Scripts No Longer Supported

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Arch Linux Now Believes Malware Incident Under Control: More Than 1,500 Affected Packages<br>Arch Linux's AUR Sees More Than 400 Packages Compromised With Malware<br>Arch Linux AUR Hit By Another Wave Of Now More Sophisticated Malware Attack<br>Russian Spam & Profanities Are Now Plaguing The Arch Linux AUR<br>AMD Opens Pre-Orders For The Linux-Friendly Ryzen AI Halo Developer Platform<br>Linux 7.1 Released: New NTFS Driver, Intel FRED For Panther Lake, Faster Arc Graphics<br>Linux 7.2 Optimization Shows +5% IOPS For EXT4 & XFS After Moving Around Two Lines Of Code<br>Firefox 152 Now Available With JPEG-XL Support Built By Default, Modernized Settings UI

Linux Finally Eliminates The strncpy API After Six Years Of Work, 360+ Patches

Linux's ARM64 NEON Intrinsics CRC64 Code Adapted To Work On 32-bit ARM

GIMP v0.54 From 1996 With Motif Toolkit Now Flatpak'ed For Modern Linux Desktops

exFAT File-System Enjoys Better Performance On Linux 7.2 With...