D-Bus Broker 18 Released While BUS1 In-Kernel IPC Remains Stalled

Version 18 of D-Bus Broker has been released, the D-Bus message bus implementation designed for high performance and better reliability compared to the D-Bus reference implementation while sticking to compatibility with the original specification.

D-Bus Broker 18 isn't the most exciting release but just has two main changes for improving its compatibility launcher. As of D-Bus Broker 18, configuration parsing errors for this launcher are handled in the same manner as dbus-daemon. Also, the compatibility launcher is no longer isolated in its own network namespace to deal with SELinux API requirements.

The brief details on D-Bus Broker 18 can be found via GitHub. This release is comprised of just a few commits since D-Bus Broker 17 debuted at the end of last year.

D-Bus Broker is currently used by the likes of Fedora and has shown its performance potential and reliability benefits over the traditional D-Bus implementation. It appears the improvements offered by D-Bus Broker are enough to please Red Hat since they haven't been doing any new work around BUS1, the several year old effort for a new in-kernel inter-process communication (IPC) mechanism born out of the previous failure of KDBUS to get traction and acceptance for mainlining in the Linux kernel.

The BUS1 module hasn't seen any new commits now in almost one year nor any side branches and no new PRs/issues pending. So at this stage it appears BUS1 efforts have stalled but at least D-Bus Broker is providing Linux IPC improvements in user-space while retaining compatibility with the widely-used D-Bus.