2026-10-01 –, Loft
Varlink is slowly getting adopted in the desktop space. This brings a few new challenges, one of them being observability: D-Bus allows us to capture the entire system and session bus and then drill down on specific interactions in the system. Varlink on the other hand is just a protocol spoken over AF_UNIX sockets and thus has no bus and no global view of the system. The talk explores how we can use eBPF and extended attributes on sockets to give us back the observability we're used to with D-Bus.
Sebastian Wick is working on Flatpak, XDG Desktop Portal, and all kinds of desktop infrastructure. He is a GNOME Foundation member and works for Red Hat.