this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2024
116 points (98.3% liked)

Linux

48656 readers
515 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

DBus is a system-wide messaging system. It's for stuff like notifications and system-wide events, ...or so do I think. But the aim is to allow all programs, running system-wide, to announce anything for others programs to react to.

This post requests people to use Varlink instead.

This is similar to the PulseAudio versus Pipewire and X11 versus Wayland situations.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

how is varlink better than dbus to justify that change?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago

The main reason is that Dbus is not available during early stages of boot. There are many others.

Varlink seems to be better or the same compared to dbus in all except two things:

  • json doesn't handle 64bit integers, it handles 52bit (or 54bit?) (size of mantissa for floats)
  • you cannot (yet) list all things connected to the bus

Details here:

https://media.ccc.de/v/all-systems-go-2024-276-varlink-now-

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Thank you :)) ! I have the same question as @umbrella if your have any other insights to share !

how is varlink better than dbus to justify that change?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

I'm unfortunately not aware.

What I do know is that D-Bus (and not "DBus") apparently doesn't work with MIME types directly. I may have been misinformed here - but this is some information I have received.

Essentially, the data sent cannot be assigned a type or format.

On the web, all data sent by a server has a MIME type ("text/html", "image/png", "video/mp4").

Android's system for inter-process ("running program") communication, intents, does include.
...Even Windows does, with its whatever complicated APIs.
D-Bus doesn't, so Tuxes too, don't. ...Yet.

D-Bus is apparently also not secure enough. Probably not as bad as X11, but not good enough.

So far, KDE and GNOME have had their own " wrapper" systems to allow using D-Bus through a layer of their code to cover little inconveniences like this.