How Debian managed the systemd transition [LWN.net]

How Debian managed the systemd transition

Posted Oct 13, 2015 15:09 UTC (Tue) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
In reply to: How Debian managed the systemd transition by nybble41
Parent article: How Debian managed the systemd transition

That's a good point, but even if you don't consider allowing the userspace app to just bang away at /dev/mem "kernel support" because that really isn't a defined API, certainly we say that limiting to the performance and capabilities of the 1990's X stack would be considered "degraded" by modern standards and applications. Making this behave safely without degraded performance required the addition of dedicated APIs, to talk to the graphics co-processor, to share memory buffers, beyond the 1980's UNIX standard ones.

We've already gone down the route of adding dedicated IPC APIs for SysV, for Netlink, for X/Wayland and now for DBUS, which I see as following the evolution of OS design and the needs of the applications of the era when these interfaces were designed.

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How Debian managed the systemd transition

Posted Oct 13, 2015 22:49 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Oh, I agree it would be bad by modern standards -- however, it was quite clearly capable of scaling to the point of handling graphics data with no more kernel support than that. To get back to the original point: unless you think D-Bus is not just going to be asked to handle graphics data but the full graphics flow of a 3D game I think the volume of data involved in graphics should not serve as an argument for needing kernel support just to handle that.