NEWS: begin putting together a NEWS section for the next release

NEWS

@@ -1,5 +1,92 @@
 systemd System and Service Manager
 
+CHANGES WITH 228:
+
+        * When creating transient services via the bus API it is now
+          possible to pass in a set of file descriptors to use as
+          STDIN/STDOUT/STDERR for the invoked process.
+
+        * A number of properties previously only settable in unit
+          files are now also available as properties to set when
+          creating transient units programmatically via the bus, as it
+          is exposed with systemd-run's --property=
+          setting. Specifically, these are: SyslogIdentifier=,
+          SyslogLevelPrefix=, TimerSlackNSec=, OOMScoreAdjust=,
+          EnvironmentFile=, ReadWriteDirectories=,
+          ReadOnlyDirectories=, InaccessibleDirectories=,
+          ProtectSystem=, ProtectHome=, RuntimeDirectory=.
+
+        * Any reference to /etc/mtab has been dropped from
+          systemd. The file has been obsolete since a while, but
+          systemd refused to work on systems where it was incorrectly
+          set up (it should be a symlink or non-existant). Please make
+          sure to update to util-linux 2.27.1 or newer in conjunction
+          with this systemd release, which also drops any reference to
+          /etc/mtab. If you maintain a distribution make sure that no
+          software you package still references it, as this is a
+          likely source of bugs. There's also a glibc bug pending,
+          asking for removal of any reference to the file:
+
+          https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=19108
+
+        * The compression framing format used by the journal or
+          coredump processing has changed to be in line with what the
+          official LZ4 tools generate. LZ4 compression support in
+          systemd was considered unsupported previously, as the format
+          was not compatible with the normal tools. With this release
+          this has changed now, and it is hence safe for downstream
+          distributions to turn it on. While not compressing as well
+          as the XZ,LZ4 is substantially faster, which makes
+          it a good default choice for the compression logic in the
+          journal and in coredump handling.
+
+        * Wherever systemd expects a calendar timestamp specification
+          (like in journalctl's --since= and --until= switches) UTC
+          timestamps are now supported. Timestamps suffixed with "UTC"
+          are now considered to be in Universal Time Coordinated
+          instead of the local timezone. Also, timestamps may now
+          optionally be specified with a sub-second accuracy. Both of
+          these additions also apply to recurring calendar event
+          specification, such as OnCalendar= in timer units.
+
+        * systemd-tmpfiles learned two new line types "q" and "Q" that
+          operate like "v", but also set up a basic btrfs quota
+          hierarchy when used on a btrfs file system with quota
+          enabled.
+
+        * systemd-detect-virt gained a new --chroot switch to detect
+          whether execution takes place in a chroot() environment.
+
+        * CPUAffinity= now takes CPU index ranges in addition to just
+          individual indexes.
+
+        * systemd will now bump the net.unix.max_dgram_qlen to 512 by
+          default now (kernel default is 16). This is beneficial for
+          avoiding blocking on AF_UNIX/SOCK_DGRAM sockets since it
+          allows substantially larger numbers of queued
+          datagrams. This should increase the capability of systemd to
+          parallelize boot-up, as logging and sd_notify() are unlikely
+          to stall execution anymore. If you need to change the value
+          from the new defaults, use the usual sysctl.d/ snippets.
+
+        * The various memory-related resource limit settings (such as
+          LimitAS=) now understand the usual K, M, G, ... suffixes to
+          the base of 1024 (IEC). Similar, the time-related settings
+          understand the usual min, h, day, ... suffixes now.
+
+        * journalctl gained a new "--sync" switch that asks the
+          journal daemon to write all so far unwritten log messages to
+          disk and sync the files, before returning.
+
+        * Support for the ".snapshot" unit type has been removed. This
+          feature turned out to be little useful and little used, and
+          has now been removed from the core and from systemctl.
+
+        * A new service execution setting PassEnvironment= has been
+          added that allows importing select environment variables
+          from PID1's environment block into the environment block of
+          the service.
+
 CHANGES WITH 227:
 
         * systemd now depends on util-linux v2.27. More specifically,