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.