Using Mojo for RPC in CrOS system services

[Chris Masone]

TL;DR: We would like every CrOS system service to be a Mojo app someday. How can we start down that path today?

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Hi, folks. For those who don't know me, I'm a long-time engineer on the Chromium OS systems software team. We're responsible for all the stuff that sits between the kernel and the browser. Since we're a Linux distribution, we've always used DBus for our RPC layer. There are upsides and downsides to this, but we'd like to at least explore using Mojo IDL for defining the interfaces to our services, hopefully as a stepping stone to someday using full-fledged Mojo IPC throughout the system.

I've written a doc that explains the background of where we're at now and why we'd like to explore using Mojo. It's entirely possible there's no way to do what we'd like to do, or it's just totally infeasible right now (even given that I'm willing to take on the work), but I would very much like to explore this with some folks. I ran the idea by Dave, and he suggested that the two of us sit down with Darin, vtl and Ben to go through it. He's on vacation next week, so it'd be wonderful to grab some time this afternoon or tomorrow if we could. If not, I'm happy to do it next week on my own.

Would you folks be willing to take some time if I put something on our calendars?

Thanks!

Chris

[Kenneth Rohde Christiansen]

I assume that you are aware of dbus being added to the kernel, aka kdbus:

https://fosdem.org/2014/schedule/event/anatomy_of_kdbus/attachments/slides/460/export/events/attachments/anatomy_of_kdbus/slides/460/kdbus_fosdem.pdf

As ChromeOS is 100% Linux it is possible to use this and it might be faster than Mojo which is cross platform.

I think it would be good if you did some performance measurement between your current dbus usage, kdbus and mojo, at least to know how performance is affected.

Cheers

Kenneth

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Kenneth Rohde Christiansen
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[Chris Masone]

I am very much aware of kdbus, yes. Performance is much less of a concern for our RPC usage than the other benefits that would come along with using Mojo.

[Kenneth Rohde Christiansen]

Could you make the document accessible to non-Google accounts? I was wondering about the reasoning behind the idea and also what you intent to do with BlueZ etc, will that then be wrapped in Mojo?

Cheers,

Kenneth