Systemd and KDE Workspaces in openSUSE 12.3

openSUSE is migrating to the use of systemd for the upcoming 12.3 version, given the difficulties that emerged in trying to co-maintain two different init systems (SysV + systemd). While I am not going into the details of this choice (I leave this to more informed people), this has some consequences for software higher in the stack.

As ConsoleKit is deprecated, systemd offers its own daemon to keep track of sessions and assigned seats in a system. However, the KDE Workspaces rely on ConsoleKit to handle user switching, reboot, shutdown and a lot of ther things. Removing ConsoleKit would mean that users would suffer feature loss. On the other hand, with something that’s been deprecated and no longer actively worked on, you have issues with maintenance.

The solution the openSUSE KDE team took was to introduce support for systemd in the KDE Workspaces (this was mainly done by Raymond “tittiatcoke” Wooninck). The task was much easier than it seemed at first, because Red Hat people have already made patches to support systemd in Fedora. The part from the KDE team was to take these patches, test them for a few months (I’ve been running them smoothly for quite a while, along with others in the group), then apply them to the packages for the next version of the distribution. We’re currently testing a patch from Fedora that allows either ConsoleKit or systemd support runtime, without needing a compile-time dependency. Once sufficient data are available, it will be pushed to the distro packages.

Other patches were directly pushed upstream by Red Hat engineers, and include a better interaction between the workspaces’ power management infrastructure and systemd itself.

In short, the next version of openSUSE (12.3) should be fully capable of handling systemd. Of course, to ensure it’s as bug free as possible it requires testing, so why don’t you jump into the fray and share your experience with us?