2.3 KiB
The System Bus: syndicate-server
- Source code:
[syndicate-rs]/syndicate-server/ - Packaging:
[synit]/packaging/packages/syndicate-server/
The syndicate-server program has a number of closely-related functions. In many ways, it is a
reification of the system layer concept itself.
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It provides a root system bus service for use by other programs. In this way, it is analogous to D-Bus.
-
It provides a gatekeeper service, for exposing capabilities to running objects as (potentially long-lived) macaroon-style "sturdy references", plus TCP/IP- and Unix-socket-based transports for accessing capabilities through the gatekeeper.
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It provides a limited configuration scripting language suitable for programming dataspaces with simple reactive behaviours.
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It provides an
inotify-based configuration loader which loads and executes configuration files written in the scripting language. -
It provides process supervision and dependency tracking services for starting other programs.
The main system bus
The synit-pid1 program invokes syndicate-server like this:
/usr/bin/syndicate-server --inferior --config /etc/syndicate/boot
The first flag, --inferior, tells the server to expect to be able to communicate on its
stdin/stdout using the standard wire protocol. This lets synit-pid1 join
the community of actors running within the system dataspace.
The second flag, --config /etc/syndicate/boot, tells the server to start monitoring the
directory tree rooted at /etc/syndicate/boot for changes. Files whose names end with .pr
within that tree are loaded as configuration script files.
Almost all of Synit is a consequence of careful use of the configuration script files in
/etc/syndicate.