Systemd 259 is out as the newest feature release for this widely-used Linux init system and service manager. Yes, there are more features in tow for this systemd release to top off 2025.

Release highlights of systemd 259 include:

• There is now experimental support for using musl libc as an alternative to the GNU C Library (glibc).

• systemd’s service manager Varlink IPC implementation has been extended and exposes a lot more capabilities now.

• New OOMKills and ManagedOOMKills properties exposed to systemd service units to count the number of process kills made by the kernel or systemd-oomd.

• systemd-udevd and systemd-repart will re-read partition tables on block devices in a more graceful and incremental manner.

• systemd-boot now supports log levels.

• Linux audit support, PAM support, libacl, libblkid, libseccomp, libselinux, and libmount all now have their support implemented via dlopen() rather than regular dynamic linking to help reduce the footprint within containers.

• systemd-modules-load will now load configured kernel modules in parallel.

• systemd-integrity-setup now supports HMAC-SHA256, PHMAC-SHA256, and PHMAC-SHA512.

• systemd’s run0 gained a "–empower" switch to invoke a new session with elevated privileges without switching to the root user.

• The default storage mode for the systemd journal is now "persistent" rather than "auto".

• systemd-boot and systemd-stub support for TPM 1.2 is now removed with focusing on only TPM 2.0 due to better security.

Coming up in the new year will be systemd 260 where it’s planned to remove support for System V service scripts among other changes.

Downloads and more details on the systemd 259 release via GitHub.