systemd/mkosi v14

on GitHub

Support for Clear Linux was dropped. See #1037 for more information.

Support for Photon was dropped. See #1048 for more information.

The Arch kernel/bootloader pacman hooks were removed. For anyone that still wants to use them, they can be found here.

mkosi now creates distro~release subdirectories inside the build, cache and output directories for each distro~release combination that is built. This allows building for multiple distros without throwing away the results of a previous distro build every time.

The preferred names for mkosi configuration files and directories are now mkosi.conf and mkosi.conf.d/ respectively. The old names (mkosi.default and mkosi.default.d) have been removed from the docs but are still supported for backwards compatibility.

plain_squashfs type images will now also be named with a .raw suffix.

tar type images will now respect the --compress option.

Pacman's SigLevel option was changed to use the same default value as used on Arch which is SigLevel = Required DatabaseOptional. If this results in keyring errors, you need to update the keyring by running pacman-key --populate archlinux.

Support for CentOS 7 was dropped. If you still need to support CentOS 7, we recommend using any mkosi version up to 13.

Support for BIOS/grub was dropped. because EFI hardware is widely available and legacy BIOS systems do not support the feature set to fully verify a boot chain from firmware to userland and it has become bothersome to maintain for little use.

To generate BIOS images you can use any version of mkosi up to mkosi 13 or the new --bios-size option. This can be used to add a BIOS boot partition of the specified size on which grub (or any other bootloader) can be installed with the help of mkosi's script support (depending on your needs most likely mkosi.postinst or mkosi.finalize). This method can also be used for other EFI bootloaders that mkosi intentionally does not support.

mkosi now unconditionally copies the kernel, initrd and kernel cmdline from the image that were previously only copied out for Qemu boot.

mkosi now runs apt and dpkg on the host. As such, we now require apt and dpkg to be installed on the host along with debootstrap in order to be able to build debian/ubuntu images.

Split dm-verity artifacts default names have been changed to match what systemd and other tools expect: image.root.raw, image.root.verity, image.root.roothash, image.root.roothash.p7s (same for usr variants).

mkosi will again default to the same OS release as the host system when the host system uses the same distribution as the image that's being built.

By default, mkosi will now change the owner of newly created directories to SUDO_UID or PKEXEC_UID if defined, unless --no-chown is used.

If systemd-nspawn v252 or newer is used, bind-mounted directories with systemd-nspawn will use the new rootidmap option so files and directories created from within the container will be owned by the actual directory owner on the host.