Two weeks ago was the release of systemd 252-rc1 with introducing the new systemd-measure command, a "support-ended" taint flag for OS images detected past their end-of-support date, and a wide variety of other changes and feature additions. Systemd 252-rc2 is now available for additional testing with various fixes plus a few more additions.

While approaching the systemd 252 stable release, systemd 252-rc2 does bring a couple more features on top of what was found in RC1 earlier this month. Some of the changes new to systemd 252-rc2 include:

- For systemd on RISC-V, the riscv_flush_icache() system call is now added to the list of system calls allowed by default when engaging the "SystemCallFilter" option.

- Drop-ins are now allowed for transient units.

- systemd's sd-stub will now use LoadImage / StartImage for executing the kernel. The sd-stub also now adds a temporary UEFI SecurityOverride to allow unsigned nested images to be booted.

- Various improvements to systemd-resolved made it in. Systemd-resolved now exposes a varlink socket for root at /run/systemd/resolve/io.systemd.Resolve.Monitor that provides processed DNS requests in a JSON format for any clients connected to this socket. Systemd's resolvectl also now supports a "monitor" option to make use of this monitoring socket.

- Portablectl gained a "--force" flag for skipping certain sanity checks.

- systemd-udev will now create infiniband/by-path and infiniband/by-ibdev links for Infiniband devices.

- The mkosi config in systemd now has support for automatically compiling a kernel with a configuration suitable for systemd testing.

Source downloads and more details on the changes coming in full for systemd 252 via the GitHub release announcement .