It's a bit after UDS Raring, but I'll blame my blog being broken on not writing the entry. It's fixed now and I wanted to take the opportunity to talk about a couple of themes that went on at UDS Raring that I'm excited about, but haven't gotten a lot of press generally.
Upstart in the user session. There is a bunch of work going on in 13.04 to start building the basis for a totally upstart based user session. Hopefully in 13.04 it'll get slightly underneath with some things changing, so the big change can happen safely in 13.10 and then be solid for 14.04. What this means in real user visible terms is that we can start to kill some of the long running processes that wait for events. Upstart gives use the ability to have more sophisticated job starting and stopping, and event listeners, so that you only have running the parts of the system you're using. The rest of the system can lay there... waiting... not sucking up resources.
Application containment (1, 2, 3, 4). There has always been an assumption in the Unix world that what happens in user space stays in user space, and that's okay, the system is secure. And this assumption has mostly worked out for us as really the number of applications running in user space has been fairly limited, and largely trusted. With things like the ability to easily publish applications in Software Center that barrier is getting lower, which is a really good thing, but it means we need to rethink security in that context. This work has been going on for a few UDSes, but at UDS-R I felt like it took a real turn to start being a workable plan that has a solution.
So while a few other big things happened at UDS this time around, these are the ones that I'm most excited about. I think they position Ubuntu well for a life on a variety of devices.
posted Nov 30, 2012 | permanent link
