Upgrading systemd on Amazon Linux 2

While this will not be everyone’s cup of tea and the majority should have no need for this tutorial, what is the Internet if not a collection of “useful” bits of information for those one-off moments that we all occasionally run into.

I recently ran into a situation, unrelated to this tutorial, where I was using Amazon Linux 2 and I needed to upgrade the version of systemd to the latest, or something close to it at least. In this case, the yum command is not helpful and the task needs to performed manually.

Getting started

The first step is to get the lay of the land and determine what your starting point is. In this example, I’m using a default installation of Amazon Linux 2 on AWS. All of the versions indicated here are at the time of writing and may not correspond to what you find in the wild.

An important thing to note is that systemd is not in the standard path and cannot simply be downloaded as a binary and dropped into place.

$ which systemd
/usr/bin/which: no systemd in (/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/sbin:/home/ec2-user/.local/bin:/home/ec2-user/bin)

There is an easy way to confirm the location, and version, of your systemd installation.

$ ps 1
  PID TTY      STAT   TIME COMMAND
    1 ?        Ss     0:02 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd --switched-root --system --deserialize 21
$ sudo /usr/lib/systemd/systemd --version
systemd 219
+PAM +AUDIT +SELINUX +IMA -APPARMOR +SMACK +SYSVINIT +UTMP +LIBCRYPTSETUP +GCRYPT +GNUTLS +ACL +XZ +LZ4 -SECCOMP +BLKID +ELFUTILS +KMOD +IDN

The first command identifies the command, and its path, /usr/lib/systemd/systemd, and the second checks the version using sudo which in this case us 219.

Prepare the environment

The next step is to prepare the local server to be able to compile systemd from source.

$ sudo yum groupinstall "Development Tools"
$ sudo yum install libcap-devel gperf glib2-devel libmount-devel
$ pip3 install --user meson
$ sudo pip3 install ninja
$ sudo pip3 install jinja2

Using sudo for pip3 will generate a warning that it is not recommended usage but it works for the purposes of this tutorial. Secure management of pip3 packages is beyond the scope of this walkthrough.

Download the source code

Based on the current version, the command to download:

$ wget https://github.com/systemd/systemd/archive/refs/tags/v252.tar.gz
$ tar -xf v252.tar.gz
$ cd systemd-252

Build process

This next section is straightforward and nearly the final step of the process.

$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo /usr/local/bin/ninja -C build install

Confirm success!

The final step is to confirm that everything works as expected:

$ sudo reboot
$ ps 1
    PID TTY      STAT   TIME COMMAND
      1 ?        Ss     0:02 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd --switched-root --system --deserialize 21
$ /usr/lib/systemd/systemd --version
systemd 252 (252)
-PAM -AUDIT -SELINUX -APPARMOR +IMA +SMACK -SECCOMP -GCRYPT -GNUTLS -OPENSSL -ACL +BLKID -CURL -ELFUTILS -FIDO2 -IDN2 -IDN -IPTC -KMOD -LIBCRYPTSETUP -LIBFDISK -PCRE2 -PWQUALITY -P11KIT -QRENCODE -TPM2 -BZIP2 -LZ4 -XZ +ZLIB -ZSTD -BPF_FRAMEWORK -XKBCOMMON +UTMP +SYSVINIT default-hierarchy=unified

As you can see, we now have version 252 installed on our system instead of the original default version.

Conclusion

This is not something we may need to do on a regular basis, it’s still important to have this list of commands available to us, just in case. The process is straightforward with only a few prerequisite commands and successful confirmation is simple.