Linus Is Looking Forward To Merging KDBUS, But Not Convinced By Performance

With the new Linux kernel mailing list thread about the prospects of merging KDBUS into the mainline Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds has provided his thoughts on the matter for this controversial feature backed by systemd developers for trying to provide a high-performance, kernel-based IPC solution.

Linus put it quite simply that he still is planning to merge it once it's been reviewed and called for inclusion (after failing to be merged for Linux 4.1), "So I am still expecting to merge it, mainly for a rather simple reason: I trust my submaintainers, and Greg in particular. So when a major submaintainer wants to merge something, that pulls a *lot* of weight with me."

One of the major selling points of KDBUS has been "better performance" than the user-space D-Bus solution for what it's based. However, this doesn't carry much weight with Torvalds. He explained, "I have to admit to being particularly disappointed with the performance argument for merging it. Having looked at the dbus performance, and come to the conclusion that the reason dbus performs abysmally badly is just pure shit user space code, I am not AT ALL impressed by the performance argument. We don't merge kernel code just because user space was written by a retarded monkey on crack. Kernel code has higher standards, and yes, that also means that it tends to perform better, but no, 'user space code is shit' is not a valid reason for pushing things into the kernel. So quite frankly, the "better performance" argument is bogus in my opinion. That still leaves other arguments, but it does weaken the case for kdbus quite a bit."

His comments can be read in full via this mailing list post. Now to see if Greg KH feels the KDBUS code is ready and goes ahead and submits a pull request for landing it in Linux 4.2...