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Systemd Notifications Support Being Worked On For Wayland's Weston

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  • Systemd Notifications Support Being Worked On For Wayland's Weston

    Phoronix: Systemd Notifications Support Being Worked On For Wayland's Weston

    With Wayland 1.10 now open for development it's time to start looking out for interesting new patches providing new functionality for Wayland and Weston. One of the new patches so far is for making use of systemd notifications in the Wayland compositor...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    So, pardon my INIT system ignorance, but does one need the INIT system to be linked to the compositor and graphic system? Was the Xserver that way? Why hasn't it been needed until now if the Wayland protocol was already defined? Or is this nothing serious, and just some playing around to see if it is useful?

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    • #3
      Originally posted by dh04000 View Post
      So, pardon my INIT system ignorance, but does one need the INIT system to be linked to the compositor and graphic system? Was the Xserver that way? Why hasn't it been needed until now if the Wayland protocol was already defined? Or is this nothing serious, and just some playing around to see if it is useful?
      Sounds to me like Weston is getting a useful feature added to it that can be rolled into its own Weston module. I don't think Wayland has anything to do with this. The concerns here would probably be moot if they moved this code to a separate module rather than as a compile time option in Weston itself, which I hope would happen in the future.

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      • #4
        Originally posted by dh04000 View Post
        So, pardon my INIT system ignorance, but does one need the INIT system to be linked to the compositor and graphic system? Was the Xserver that way? Why hasn't it been needed until now if the Wayland protocol was already defined? Or is this nothing serious, and just some playing around to see if it is useful?
        systemd is way more than just an init system. systemd-notify is used to notify the services manager about events like start-up completion and status changes. It probably has to do with systemd being aware of when the compositor is started, restarted, or it stops unexpectedly.

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        • #5
          Upstream systemd developers have already started looking at the patch but some concerns have been raised over this optional systemd feature appearing in Weston's main() function.
          Michael, what makes you think any systemd developer is looking at that patch? In fact, it wasn't even sent to the systemd mailing list (and there is no reason to send it) so i doubt any systemd developer is aware of it.

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          • #6
            If you follow the mailing list that Michael linked and read some comments I THINK this is about getting feedback from "systemctl status foobar.service." This is to enable the ability for the compositor to post a desktop notifier saying "Hey, just a heads up, your foobar service just crashed hard. We're restarting it, but ya'll got a problem."
            All opinions are my own not those of my employer if you know who they are.

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            • #7
              Originally posted by giucam View Post
              Michael, what makes you think any systemd developer is looking at that patch? In fact, it wasn't even sent to the systemd mailing list (and there is no reason to send it) so i doubt any systemd developer is aware of it.
              Just a simple typo, now fixed. Thanks.
              Michael Larabel
              https://www.michaellarabel.com/

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              • #8
                Originally posted by dh04000 View Post
                So, pardon my INIT system ignorance, but does one need the INIT system to be linked to the compositor and graphic system? Was the Xserver that way? Why hasn't it been needed until now if the Wayland protocol was already defined? Or is this nothing serious, and just some playing around to see if it is useful?
                systemd integrates the dbus/kdbus IPC bus. This provides a uniform universal interface for services to post notifications of events and state changes. That way other systems can subscribe to those notifications and act upon them. It's a nice abstract alternative to registering callbacks by directly integrating code with another service or library.

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                • #9
                  Originally posted by dh04000 View Post
                  So, pardon my INIT system ignorance, but does one need the INIT system to be linked to the compositor and graphic system? Was the Xserver that way? Why hasn't it been needed until now if the Wayland protocol was already defined? Or is this nothing serious, and just some playing around to see if it is useful?
                  systemd is a system manager. As such, it has stuff to tell users. The compositor is as good a place as any to receive these stuffs and display them to the user. It has nothing to do with the wayland protocol, just the weston compositor.

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by erendorn View Post

                    systemd is a system manager. As such, it has stuff to tell users. The compositor is as good a place as any to receive these stuffs and display them to the user. It has nothing to do with the wayland protocol, just the weston compositor.

                    Your comment is equally confused as the phoronix article was confusing to start with.

                    This patch is not about systemd notifying weston of things. It has nothing to do with what desktop environments usually calls notifications. This is weston notifying systemd of it's current state and also supporting the Watchdog functionality that can optionally be enabled in a systemd unit file.

                    Since systemd doesn't just launch a service and hope everything goes well after that, it actually keeps track of things. For example if you want systemd to keep pinging your service and if your service freezes (and stops replying to the ping) then have systemd restart your service you can do so by supporting the sd_notify API for watchdog and enabling the Watchdog directive et.al. in your service file.

                    For a longer and better description of this see http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/watchdog.html

                    Now go implement this in your favourite daemon that does not yet support the systemd watchdog api so we can enable Watchdog in all service files and have systems that automatically repairs themselves quickly without having to login and manually restart services causing long downtimes!
                    Last edited by fatal; 25 September 2015, 05:39 AM.

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