2026-09-30 –, Loft
The limitations of systemd-sysext/confext from the early days are mostly gone nowadays. The loading of extension images from the initrd means that generic content will behave as expected without any workarounds. New settings help making live reconfiguration work better as well. We will see how declarative configuration management with systemd-sysext/confext from git can be done with an OpenTofu/Terraform module. For image-based Linux binding configuration together with a pinned OS version is now possible through bootctl link. OS builders can ship /etc files through a default confext image.
systemd-sysext/confext: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/devel/systemd-sysext.html
bootctl: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/devel/bootctl.html
Kai Lüke is a founding engineer at Amutable. As a maintainer of Flatcar Container Linux at Kinvolk and Microsoft he worked on all aspects of image-based operating systems. His interests span low-level OS topics such as systemd-sysext, robust updates, reliable configuration management, and infra as code.