A while ago I wrote about the limited usefulness of SO_PEERPIDFD. for authenticating sandboxed applications. The core problem was simple: while pidfds gave us a race-free way to identify a process, we still had no standardized way to figure out what that process actually was - which sandbox it ran in, what application it represented, or what permissions it should have. The situation has improved considerably since then. cgroup xattrs Cgroups now support user extended attributes. This feature ...| swick's blog
Andy Holmes wrote an excellent overview of XDG Intents in his “Best Intentions” blog post, covering the foundational concepts and early proposals. Unfortunately, due to GNOME Foundation issues, this work never fully materialized. As I have been running into more and more cases where this would provide a useful primitive for other features, I tried to continue the work. The specifications have evolved as I worked on implementing them in glib, desktop-file-utils and ptyxis. Here’s what’...| Posts on swick's blog
Writing asynchronous code in C has always been a challenge. Traditional callback-based approaches, including GLib’s async/finish pattern, often lead to the so-called callback hell that’s difficult to read and maintain. The libdex library offers a solution to this problem, and I recently worked on expanding the integration with GLib’s GDBus subsystem. The Problem with the Sync and Async Patterns Writing C code involving tasks which can take non-trivial amount of time has traditionally re...| swick's blog
At the Linux App Summit (LAS) in Albania three months ago, I gave a talk about testing in the xdg-desktop-portal project. There is a recording of the presentation, and the slides are available as well. To give a quick summary of the work I did: Revamped the CI Reworked and improved the pytest based integration test harness Added integration tests for new portals Ported over all the existing GLib/C based integration tests Support ASAN for detecting memory leaks in the tests Made tests pretend ...| swick's blog
A few weeks ago, a bunch of display driver and compositor developers met once again for the third iteration of the Display Next Hackfest. The tradition was started by Red Hat, followed by Igalia (thanks Melissa), and now AMD (thanks Harry). We met in the AMD offices in Markham, Ontario, Canada; and online, to discuss issues, present things we worked on, figure out future steps on a bunch of topics related to displays, GPUs, and compositors.| swick's blog
One of the things I’m working on at Red Hat is HDR support. HDR is inherently linked to luminance (brightness, but ignoring human perception) which makes it an important parameter for us that we would like to be in control of. One reason is rather stupid. Most external HDR displays refuse to let the user control the luminance in their on-screen-display (OSD) if the display is in HDR mode. Why? Good question. Read my previous blog post.| swick's blog
Sometimes I just want to do a small thing, like creating a blog, and then end up noticing everything is horrible and I should probably start fixing things at the root. In this instance, my personal server from a hoster didn’t receive an update in a long time. $ cat /etc/os-release | grep PRETTY_NAME PRETTY_NAME="Debian GNU/Linux 9 (stretch)" Debian 9… that seems a bit old. Stretch also had benefited from Long Term Support (LTS) until the end of June 2022.| swick's blog
