Systemd for the user session

Status: In Progress

Description

When booted on systemd systems, we can use systemd to also manage parts of the user session. There are a number of benefits to this, but the primary one is to place each application in its own kernel cgroup. This allows gnome-shell to do application matching more reliably, and one can use resource controls to (for example) say Epiphany only gets 20% of system RAM.

Furthermore, this lays some fundamental groundwork for application sandboxing.

It's important to note that with these patches, we still support non-systemd systems (as well as older systemd). How far into the future we do so is an open question, but it should not be too difficult to leave non-systemd systems with the previous model over the next few cycles.

See this message (and thread) for technical details.

Owner

Colin Walters

Involved Parties

Affected modules: dbus, gdm, glib, gnome-session, gnome-shell, systemd, xcb-libxcb, xorg-lib-libX11, xorg-lib-libXau, polkit

Patches for all of these are maintained here.

Current Status

With the above patches, one can log in.

• polkit is broken: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=67728

How to Help

Send a mail to Colin Walters, or discuss on systemd-devel.