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wooptoo | 28 days ago

Hi, I'm trying to find Lennart Poettering's presentations, but they don't seem to be available yet? https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/speaker/lennart_poettering/ Thanks

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ignoramous|28 days ago

The FOSDEM speakers are sent emails to review and approve the video recording (this involves rudimentary stuff like reviewing the start and end time, if the automated system didn't get it right; choosing one of the three audio channels etc). The recordings that have been reviewed and approved would be online by now.

ahartmetz|28 days ago

Look forward to ye olde uncle Lennart's old-timey sales pitch.

I'm gonna summarize the Varlink talk: DBus is, and I quote, "very very very complex" and his system with JSON for low-level IPC is, in fact, the best thing since sliced bread and has no significant flaws. It works basically just like HTTP so the web people will love it. Kernel support for more great shit pending! I'm not sure where the hardon for a new IPC system with lernel (keeping that typo) support is from, but he's been trying for 15 years now. AFAICT, the service discovery problem could be solved by a user space service without much trouble. I mean if the whole thing wasn't an exercise in bad technological taste.

gnoack|27 days ago

I think you are misrepresenting this;

Varlink is based on much more conventional UNIX technology than Dbus, which is decades old: You connect to a named UNIX socket through its socket file in the filesystem (man page: unix(7)).

This is an old mechanism and it is known to work well. It does not require a broker service, it works right at system startup, and it does not require a working user database for permission checks (which would be a circular dependency for systemd in some configurations). If at all, I am surprised that systemd didn't use that earlier.

The main thing that Varlink standardizes on top of that is a JSON-based serialization format for a series of request/response pairs. But that seems like a lightweight addition.

It also does not require kernel support to work, the kernel support is already there. He mentioned in the talk that he'd like to be able to "tag" UNIX sockets that speak varlink as such, with kernel support. But that is not a prerequisite to use this at all. The service discovery -- and he said that in the talk as well -- is simply done by listing socket files in the file system, and by having a convention for where they are created.

thinkbud|28 days ago

I do not share your view of old timey sales pitch, at least for the talk about systemd nspawn OCI container support.

If anything, that talk was a tad low effort, with even dismissive answers — "Yes" and "No?" as full answers to audience questions, with no follow up?! Still very informative though!

miduil|28 days ago

Hehe, I'm eagerly waiting for this one as well as I'd be extremely happy to replace some hack to run docker images with `systemd-nspawn` served from the nix store.