Re: A desktop environment[1] kernel wishlist

Bastien Nocera
2014-10-27T13:56:21Z

On Tue, 2014-10-21 at 12:28 -0700, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> On 10/21/2014 01:49 AM, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> > Hey,
> >
> > GNOME has had discussions with kernel developers in the past, and,
> > fortunately, in some cases we were able to make headway.
> >
> > There are however a number of items that we still don't have solutions
> > for, items that kernel developers might not realise we'd like to rely
> > on, or don't know that we'd make use of if merged.
> >
> > I've posted this list at:
> > https://wiki.gnome.org/BastienNocera/KernelWishlist
> >
> > Let me know on-list or off-list if you have any comments about those, so
> > I can update the list.
>
> I don't know much about desktop environment infrastructure, but I think
> the kernel probably already has a lot of what's needed for LinuxApps.
>
> Tools like Sandstorm [1] (shameless plug, but it's a good example here)
> can already sandbox normal-ish programs, and those sandboxes can be
> launched without privilege [2].
>
> Why is kdbus needed?

Because it sucks less than passing fd's and using home-made protocols on
top of it.

> Why are overlays better than, say, btrfs
> lightweight copies here? Also, overlayfs might actually make it for 3.19.

Overlayfs works on more than just btrfs, which is useful to not rely on
a particular filesystem to implement those features.

> As for childfs, I implemented procfs polling a couple years ago, but it
> never went anywhere:
>
> http://lkml.kernel.org/g/1840e47fc4113af16989a4250d98bed62a9bce53.1354559528.git.luto@amacapital.net
>
> If that would help, I can try to dust it off and get it in to the kernel.

I'll pass that on to Ryan who requested this feature.

Cheers