UPDATE: If systemd coming to postmarketOS is news to you, please read the original announcement first.
With the 24.12 stable release out the door and the holidays over, as promised we will finally be merging the systemd staging branch into pmaports master. We plan to do this tomorrow (Friday, 2025-01-10). Please note that it will take some time until all systemd related packages and images are built, and that pmaports CI and building your own images may not behave as expected on this day.
The rollout means that images (prebuilts on our downloads page and ones you build yourself) will use systemd by default on the following UIs initially:
- GNOME (mobile)
- Plasma (mobile)
- Phosh
If you maintain a device in pmaports, especially one we build images for and you haven't yet had a chance to try out systemd, now is the perfect time to find and fix any pesky bugs. Notably, device specific services that don't have packaged systemd unit files will not work!
Check out the systemd wiki page for instructions on how to build systemd images yourself and an explanation on service files.
Please label systemd-specific bugs for your device with the systemd label!
Unit files should be packaged in the systemd-services package, the APKBUILD has instructions for adding new services.
UPDATE: in the chat it was unclear whether existing OpenRC installations are affected. As the systemd packages live in an extra repository, they should not affect the OpenRC installations (but as usually when merging big changes there may be some unexpected fallout). Existing OpenRC installations are not automatically switched over. You can still select OpenRC in "pmbootstrap init" after this is merged.
Update (2025-01-10)
The merge was done, related build.postmarketos.org code changes were merged too and packages are still building as of writing. See the current status at https://build.postmarketos.org and #140.
If you were using the staging repository before and want to switch over:
- Wait until the binary packages for your architecture are built!
- Edit
/etc/apk/repositoriesand changestaging/systemdtoextra-repos/systemd apk updateapk upgrade -a
Update (2025-01-12)
Images with systemd are building, and the first ones were built successfully!
- Look for Gnome (Mobile), Plasma (Mobile), Phosh images dated 2025-01-12 or newer here.
- If you need service files that we have not packaged yet, see the systemd/services wiki article.
- Read the systemd wiki article for building your own images with pmbootstrap.
Join the postmarketos-systemd chat if you have any questions. Happy hacking!