One of the design goals of Unity was to have an Application-centric user experience. Components like the Launcher consolidate all of the windows into a single icon instead of a set like the GNOME 2 panel. Nothing else in Ubuntu thinks about applications in this way making it a difficult user experience to create. X11 worries about windows. DBus worries about connections. The kernel focuses on PIDs. None of these were focused on applications, just parts of applications. We created the BAMF Application Matching Framework (BAMF) to try and consolidate these, and while it has done a heroic job, its task is simply impossible. We need to push this concept lower into the stack.

First we looked at the display server and started thinking about how it could be more application centric. That effort resulted in Mir. Mir gets connections from applications and manages their associated windows together. They can have multiple windows, but they always get tracked back to the application that created them. Unity can then always associate and manage them together, as an application, without any trickery.

Application confinement also provides another piece of this puzzle. It creates a unified set of security policies for the application independent of how many submodules or processes exist for it. One cache directory, set of settings and policies follow the application around. Apparmor provides a consistent and flexible way of managing the policies along with the security that we need to keep users safe.

To start to look at the process management aspect of this I started talking to James Hunt about using Upstart, our process manager in Ubuntu. Working together we came up with a small little upstart user session job that can start and stop applications, and also track them. I've pushed the first versions of that to a test repository in Launchpad. What this script provides is the simple semantics of doing:

$ start application APP_ID=gedit
$ stop application APP_ID=gedit
to manage the application. Of course, the application lifecycle is also important, but Upstart provides us an guaranteed way of making sure the application stops at the end of the session.

Upstart can also help us to guarantee application uniqueness. If you try and start an application twice you get this:

$ start application APP_ID=inkscape
application (inkscape) start/running, process 30878
$ start application APP_ID=inkscape
start: Job is already running: application (inkscape)
This way we can ensure that a single icon on the launcher associates to a set of processes, managed by the process manager itself. In the past libraries like libunique have accomplished this using DBus name registration. Which, for the most part, works. Using DBus registration relies on well behaving applications, which basically guarantee their own uniqueness. By using Upstart we can have misbehaving applications, and still guarantee their uniqueness for the Unity to show the user.

We're just getting started on getting this setup and working. The schedule isn't yet final for vUDS next week, but I imagine we'll get a session for it. Come and join in and help us define this feature if it interests you.


posted May 7, 2013 | permanent link