(resend, fix Daniel's email address) Hi Greg and Daniel, I don't have a clue so I need to ask some stupid questions... On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 11:16:04AM -0800, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote: > kdbus is a kernel-level IPC implementation that aims for resemblance to > the the protocol layer with the existing userspace D-Bus daemon while > enabling some features that couldn't be implemented before in userspace. > > The documentation in the first patch in this series explains the > protocol and the API details. How about the big picture? > Reasons why this should be done in the kernel, instead of userspace as > it is currently done today include the following: [abbreviated] > - performance > - security > - semantics for apps with heavy data payloads First of all I wonder about the relationship with D-Bus. http://dbus.freedesktop.org/doc/dbus-specification.html says: D-Bus is designed for two specific use cases: A "system bus" for notifications from the system to user sessions, and to allow the system to request input from user sessions. A "session bus" used to implement desktop environments such as GNOME and KDE. D-Bus is not intended to be a generic IPC system for any possible application, and intentionally omits many features found in other IPC systems for this reason. Does this also apply to kdbus? If not, what are the suggested uses of kdbus beyond those where D-Bus is currently used? Another related quote by Havoc Pennington: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dbus/2012-March/015024.html In general, reading this, I think in some cases there are problems that make sense to fix in dbus, and in other cases there are problems that are best solved by not using dbus. ... there are about 10000 IPC solutions already, from ICE (both of them) to ZeroMQ to AMQP to CORBA to X11 to HTTP to SOAP to WebSockets to SUN-RPC to whatever-the-heck. To me, trying to make dbus configurable so that it can substitute for any of these is a Bad Idea (tm). Do you think it also applies to kdbus? Wrt the performance improvement achieved by kdbus, my impression about D-Bus is that the number of messages on my system is about a dozen per minute. Are there actually any existing applications using D-Bus that have a performance issue? Or is this only about future possible uses? Linked from http://kroah.com/log/blog/2014/01/15/kdbus-details/, http://lwn.net/Articles/580194/ "The unveiling of kdbus" says: Unlike most other kernels, Linux has never had a well-designed IPC mechanism. Windows and Mac OS have this feature; even Android, based on Linux, has one in the form of the "binder" subsystem. Linux, instead, has only had the primitives — sockets, FIFOs, and shared memory — but those have never been knitted together into a reasonable application-level API. Kdbus is an attempt to do that knitting and create something that is at least as good as the mechanisms found on other systems. These are bold words. I'm not sure what Windows and Mac OS have in terms of IPC, but the above suggests that kdbus is *the* new Linux IPC that everyone will use for everything, rather than a special purpose facility. True? Thanks, Johannes -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-api" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
