2026-10-01 –, Loft
Systemd provides a growing set of very useful varlink APIs. With the new Rust-based varlink-http-bridge, it is possible to expose any number of them over the network securely via https/websockets, including over vsock, with all of the interesting varlink features like "more" support or "protocol-upgrade" support.
This presentation gives an overview of why varlink and websockets are such a good fit, why the varlink-http-bridge implementation is mostly just a transparent byte proxy, and how it plugs into varlinkctl seamlessly to make networked varlinkctl calls "just work". It also explains the security model and the plans for the future.
The project lives in https://github.com/systemd/varlink-http-bridge.
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