News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Bus1 – Kernel Message Bus by pcwalton on Wednesday October 26, 2016 @09:51PM (#12802333)
I don't have much of an opinion on how good this particular proposal is, but it is important to have a sensible IPC system for Linux. I see a lot of resistance to this, with claims that Unix sockets and POSIX are good enough. As the maintainer of Rust's ipc-channel, which wraps all this stuff, I strongly disagree. The complexity of the Linux implementation of ipc-channel [1] has been absurd compared to the Mac implementation, which uses Mach [2]. Don't let the similar lines-of-code count fool you—90% of the bugs that I've seen go by have been in the POSIX backend, necessitating things like manual fragmentation to get around size limits in the kernel, weird structure alignment rules in the cmsg API, file descriptor limits, ENOBUFS stuff, etc. etc. By contrast, the Mach implementation has more or less "just worked".

At this point I don't really care what the Linux kernel decides on, as long as it decides on something. kdbus or Binder or anything would have been fine; the people who are truly hurt by kernel politics are us developers.

[1]: https://github.com/servo/ipc-channel/blob/master/src/platfor...

[2]: https://github.com/servo/ipc-channel/blob/master/src/platfor...

Re:Bus1 – Kernel Message Bus by ktRolster on Wednesday October 26, 2016 @09:57PM (#12802358)
The reason people think that IPC is not important (and I agree with you, btw) is because so often bad designs are built around IPC.

The reason Linux is opposed to integrating IPC into the kernel is because it's been done more than once, poorly, resulting in a lousy API that needs to be supported forever by kernel devs.

So come up with a good solution.

Re:Bus1 – Kernel Message Bus by TD-Linux on Thursday October 27, 2016 @03:32AM (#12803444)
What previous "bad IPC" mechanisms were integrated into mainline Linux? Only one I can think of is sysv shared memory.
Re:Bus1 – Kernel Message Bus by ktRolster on Thursday October 27, 2016 @02:49PM (#12808232)
All of them :)

Pipes are too specialized, localSockets are kind of a pain, etc.

Re:Bus1 – Kernel Message Bus by mfukar on Thursday October 27, 2016 @05:37AM (#12803843)
Most recently, kdbus. It wasn't even ABI-compatible.
Re:Bus1 – Kernel Message Bus by dezgeg on Thursday October 27, 2016 @06:06AM (#12803935)
kdbus was never merged to mainline.
Re:Bus1 – Kernel Message Bus by mfukar on Thursday October 27, 2016 @06:55AM (#12804064)
Sorry, I took 'integrated' to mean something other than merged. No, kdbus was never part of the kernel repo.
Re:Bus1 – Kernel Message Bus by darfs on Thursday October 27, 2016 @06:12AM (#12803946)
Maybe that's why it's Bad :?
Re:Bus1 – Kernel Message Bus by pjc50 on Saturday November 05, 2016 @12:28PM (#12880423)
So .. could we have Mach reimplemented in Linux?