We're hiring!
*

GTK+ Hackfest 2017: D-Bus communication with containers

Simon McVittie avatar

Simon McVittie
March 24, 2017

Share this post:

Reading time:

At the GTK+ Hackfest in London (which accidentally became mostly a Flatpak hackfest) I've mainly been looking into how to make D-Bus work better for app container technologies like Flatpak and Snap.

The initial motivating use cases are:

  • Portals: Portal authors need to be able to identify whether the container is being contacted by an uncontained process (running with the user's full privileges), or whether it is being contacted by a contained process (in a container created by Flatpak or Snap).

  • dconf: Currently, a contained app either has full read/write access to dconf, or no access. It should have read/write access to its own subtree of dconf configuration space, and no access to the rest.

After a lot of discussion with dconf maintainer Allison Lortie and Flatpak maintainer Alexander Larsson, I think I have a plan for fixing this.

Visit Simon's blog to continue reading!


Search the newsroom

Latest Blog Posts

Simplifying Bluetooth qualification for Linux/BlueZ: New upstream documentation

26/05/2026

New upstream BlueZ documentation helps simplify Bluetooth qualification for Linux-based products by mapping supported profiles, test requirements,…

Building Tyr in Rust: CSF architecture and booting the MCU

14/05/2026

See how Tyr moves beyond MCU firmware boot to build the group, queue, VM, submission, and completion paths needed to run real Vulkan workloads…

Optimizing memory access in NIR

07/05/2026

A complete breakdown of Mesa’s NIR compiler detailing how it optimizes shader memory access with SSA promotion, deref analysis, copy propagation,…

BlueZ-powered Auracast broadcasting on Genio 700

05/05/2026

Collabora brought Bluetooth Auracast broadcasting to MediaTek Genio 700 for Embedded World 2026. Here's the complete, fully Open Source…

Making the invisible audible: Building an OpenXR experience for ocean protection

22/04/2026

Using our XR expertise, Collabora created a standalone XR experience for our 1% for the Planet partner, SOMAR, to showcase the direct impact…

Bringing BitNet to ExecuTorch via Vulkan

17/04/2026

BitNet-style ternary brings LLM inference to ExecuTorch via its Vulkan backend, enabling much smaller, bandwidth-efficient models with portable…

Open Since 2005 logo

Our website only uses a strictly necessary session cookie provided by our CMS system. To find out more please follow this link.

Collabora Limited © 2005-2026. All rights reserved. Privacy Notice. Sitemap.