Re: Spectrum OS management daemon?

[Alyssa Ross <hi@alyssa.is>]

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Demi Marie Obenour <demiobenour@gmail.com> writes:

>> With proposals like this, it's important to communicate why it might be
>> an improvement over the current situation.  All of these things are
>> things we easily could do without needing a monolithic daemon.
>
> To me, there are a couple advantages of using one or more
> daemons for this work:
>
> 1. It makes privilege separation easier.  For instance, VMs that
>    crash can notify Cloud Hypervisor via a pvpanic interface, but
>    Cloud Hypervisor does not have the privileges to directly
>    inform the user of this in any reasonable way [^1].  Instead,
>    it should make an IPC call to a (socket-activated) service that
>    notifies the user and logs some information to a file, which
>    the user can choose to manually attack to a bug report if they
>    wish.

But that socket-activated service doesn't need to be a daemon!  It can
run when it's activated, and then exit, and be started again next time a
VM crashes, rather than taking up resources the whole time in between.

> 2. It avoids putting too much responsibility in the GUI.  Right
>    now, the obvious way to start an application is for the user
>    to click on a .desktop file, which runs the needed s6 commands
>    to start the application's VM and the services that VM relies
>    on.  Similarly, the obvious way to keep track of runtime state
>    (like "which application has which device attached to it") is
>    to have the GUI store all of that.  To me, this seems to make
>    the desktop environment itself a "god daemon", which I'd also
>    prefer to avoid.

Oh yes, for sure we're not having the desktop environment do it. :)

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