Re: Why not make kdbus use CUSE?

[Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh-hQyY1W1yCW8ekmWlsbkhG0B+6BGkLq7r@public.gmane.org>]

On Sat, Nov 29, 2014 at 06:34:16AM +0000, Richard Yao wrote:
> I had the opportunity at LinuxCon Europe to chat with Greg and some other kdbus
> developers. A few things stood out from our conversation that I thought I would
> bring to the list for discussion.

Any reason why you didn't respond to the kdbus patches themselves?
Critiquing the specific code is much better than random discussions.

> They regard a userland compatibility shim in the systemd repostory to provide
> backward compatibility for applications. Unfortunately, this is insufficient to
> ensure compatibility because dependency trees have multiple levels. If cross
> platform package A depends on cross platform library B, which depends on dbus,
> and cross platform library B decides to switch to kdbus, then it ceases to be
> cross platform and cross platform package A is now dependent on Linux kernels
> with kdbus. Not only does that affect other POSIX systems, but it also affects
> LTS versions of Linux.

What does LTS versions have anything to do here?  And what specific
dependancies are you worried about?

> It is somewhat tempting to think that being in the kernel is necessary for
> performance, this does not appear to be true from my discussion with Greg and
> others. In specific, a key advantage of being in the kernel is a reduction in
> context switches and consequently, one would expect programs using the old API
> to benefit, but they were quite clear to me that programs using the old API do
> not benefit. At the same time, we had a similar situation where people thought
> that the httpd server had to be inside the kernel until Linux 2.6, when our
> userland APIs improved to the point where we were able to get similar if not
> better performance in userland compared to the implementation of khttpd in Linux
> 2.4.y.

Again, please see the kernel patches for lots of detail as to why this
should be in the kernel.  If you disagree with the specific statements I
have listed there, please respond with specifics.

> I started to think that we probably ought to design a way to put kdbus into
> userland and then I realized that we already have one in the form of CUSE. This
> would not only makes kdbus play nicely with SELinux and lxc, but also other
> POSIX systems that currently share dbus with Linux systems, which includes older
> Linux kernels. Greg claimed that the kdbus code was fairly self contained and
> was just a character device, so I assume this is possible and I am curious why
> it is not done.

The latest version is a filesystem not a character device, your
information is out of date :)

> P.S. I also mentioned my concern that having the shim in the systemd repository
> would have a negative effect on distributons that use alterntaive libc libraries
> because the systemd developers refuse to support alternative libc libraries. I
> mentioned this to one of the people to whom Greg introduced me (and whose name
> escapes me) as we were walking to Michael Kerrisk's talk on API design. I was
> told quite plainly that such distributions are not worth consideration. If kdbus
> is merged despite concerns about security and backward compatibility, could we
> at least have the shim moved to libc netural place, like Linus' tree?

Take that up on the systemd mailing list, it's not a kernel issue.

greg k-h