Playlist "Grazer Linuxtage 2025"
systemd's D-Bus Implementation, And Its Python asyncio Binding
An overview of D-Bus, systemd, and systemd's own D-Bus implementation, [`sd-bus`](https://0pointer.net/blog/the-new-sd-bus-api-of-systemd.html). Less slide show, more live coding in Python and [`asyncio`](https://docs.python.org/3/library/asyncio.html>).
D-Bus is a broker-based interprocess communication mechanism which has been used for ages in Linux's desktop environments like [GNOME](https://www.gnome.org/) or [KDE](https://kde.org/).
[systemd](https://systemd.io/), the Linux init system and service manager, likewise consists of many loosely coupled components. Since systemd's inception, likewise, its components are using D-Bus to communicate.
Over time, the systemd developers have become uncomfortable with the existing D-Bus implementation they were using. They created another implementation, [sd-bus](https://0pointer.net/blog/the-new-sd-bus-api-of-systemd.html), tailored towards systemd's needs - minimal and fast.
This talk gives an overview of D-Bus and its concepts, and then shows how sd-bus is used to implement one's own interfaces and components. Out of its many language bindings, we will use Python to implement a use case, just to show how simple this is.
You will probably like the use of [asyncio](https://docs.python.org/3/library/asyncio.html) in the talk. For those of you who don't know what this is and what problems it solves, I'll try to explain, however hard that may be. I might fail though. If you are interested: my last year's talk [Python, asyncio, libgpiod, and Pointless Blinking](https://media.ccc.de/v/glt24-435-python-asyncio-libgpiod-and-pointless-blinking) contains a deeper [asyncio](https://docs.python.org/3/library/asyncio.html) introduction.
Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/