GNOME Makes Progress On Sandboxed Applications

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GNOME Makes Progress On Sandboxed Applications

GNOME has quietly been working on sandboxed applications support and for GNOME 3.16 they hope to ship an initial reference runtime implementation of their new technology...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-Sandboxed-Apps

[Cerberus]

Canonical has the same goal (sandboxed applications etc) with Unity 8 and Mir for a while now, that already works on Ubuntu Touch I believe but it wont arrive on the desktop before the next LTS when Unity 8 and Mir are supposed to become default on desktop.

[Drago]

Linux cgroups, Linux namespaces, SELinux, .... sounds so like Docker.

[balouba]

Linux cgroups, Linux namespaces, SELinux, .... sounds so like Docker.

much ignorance these days. do you think these technologies werent in use before docker?
the only difference is the amount of press one product gets due to commercial backing.

docker is made differently - it isolates things to be used "like a vm", provides an API, and runs a service.
the gnome apps dont need a service provider, dont provide an API, and run standalone, not as system images
they all use the same kernel technologies to separate their resources.

[Drago]

much ignorance these days. do you think these technologies werent in use before docker?
the only difference is the amount of press one product gets due to commercial backing.

docker is made differently - it isolates things to be used "like a vm", provides an API, and runs a service.
the gnome apps dont need a service provider, dont provide an API, and run standalone, not as system images
they all use the same kernel technologies to separate their resources.

Docker is synonym for "container technology". Other container technologies for Linux exists that are not like docker: OpenVZ comes to mind.
Don't be so touchy. And yes, cgroups usage spiked with Docker, and made it available for regular users ( like me ).
I don't know what you think about Docker, but for me it sounds like a perfect fit. You can have the base image as the `runtime`, and the other images above as the user application. Docker can maintain and de-dup all shared layers between the user apps.

[RahulSundaram]

Linux cgroups, Linux namespaces, SELinux, .... sounds so like Docker.

That is not surprising since Alex who wrote the GNOME sandboxing code is a major contributor to Docker. This is built on similar underlying kernel features with desktop specific metadata and Wayland support.

[M@yeulC]

My only hope is that we won't have GNOME Apps, KDE Apps, Unity Apps, Systemd Apps, etc... but just "Linux Apps", completely portable between systems.
Please, everyone, for once, try to work together !
If these apps are designed not to be portable, it will crush the Linux desktop into pieces. On the other hand, It wouldn't be hard to design a portable system (OK, not hard to design, but hard to agree on the design).
From my point of view, as long as the Applications are packaged in a standardized manner, implementations can vary (Systemd folks can even have their own if they want to, I really don't care about this).

That would be great, and if I were Microsoft, I would do everything I could (including sponsoring the development of a concurrent technology) to stop this unification. Because Linux Apps is (still in my opinion) the thing that can make Linux finally takeoff on the Desktop side.

[justmy2cents]

That is not surprising since Alex who wrote the GNOME sandboxing code is a major contributor to Docker. This is built on similar underlying kernel features with desktop specific metadata and Wayland support.

what about kdbus? last time I read it was requirement too. how will F22 handle preview it if kdbus is not yet in mainline kernel (i really hope they succeed)?

second question. did i read correct when i assumed that fact they use OSTree means those sandboxes could be used in any distro providing it has all required tech

[magika]

Canonical has the same goal (sandboxed applications etc) with Unity 8 and Mir for a while now, that already works on Ubuntu Touch I believe but it wont arrive on the desktop before the next LTS when Unity 8 and Mir are supposed to become default on desktop.

If its usable only on Ubuntu, what is the point...

[chrisb]

much ignorance these days. do you think these technologies werent in use before docker?
the only difference is the amount of press one product gets due to commercial backing.

docker is made differently - it isolates things to be used "like a vm", provides an API, and runs a service.
the gnome apps dont need a service provider, dont provide an API, and run standalone, not as system images
they all use the same kernel technologies to separate their resources.

No, docker uses lxc (Linux containers) which uses cgroups and everything runs on the same kernel - just the same as GnomeApps. The plan is that Gnome Apps will be able to share versioned library bundles and each app will be linked to one of those runtime bundles (like Android apps have runtimes for 1.2, 1.3, 1.4... Similar thing) So with docker you have a base filesystem with some kind of versioned overlays, and with Gnome Apps you will have some kind of overlay filesystem built from the archives of libraries. Different but similar.

Of course there will be controversy over whether other distributions and desktops want, or will, support these apps or not. Hypothetically they might, but the history of cross desktop integration in Linux is not encouraging (do we even have shared contacts yet? A fundamental that has worked across Android apps since 1.0, but failed to materialise on the Linux desktop in, what, 20+ years?)