inetd/xinetd functionality with systemd?

[Voltago]

Hi all,

I'm thinking of dipping my toe into the systemd pool, but I'm a bit hazy as to its capabilities nowadays. One thing I'd like to find out whether or not it can replace [x]inetd in some or most cases. More specifically, xinetd can define a service to connect process stdio to a listening network port, like so

[Leio]

Systemd has a builtin equivalent functionality for this, called socket units. You can have systemd listen on a port and then when something connects to it, it'll only then launch up the service and pass the socket to it.
Various services also ship with these, so you can e.g enable the sshd.socket unit instead of sshd.service, and it'll launch up sshd only when something connects to it, and keep sshd closed otherwise.
You can even have these sockets spin up a container and pass it into there.

https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.socket.html
http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/socket-activation.html
http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/socket-activated-containers.html
_________________
GNOME team lead; GStreamer; MIPS/ARM64

[Voltago]

Thanks Leio, much appreciated!