MeeGo applauncherd: faster application startup and more

[Thomas Voß]

On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 2:14 PM, Marc Deslauriers
<marc.deslauriers at canonical.com> wrote:
> On 13-06-17 01:33 AM, Alberto Mardegan wrote:
>> Hi all!
>>   I'm sending this message both to ubuntu-devel and ubuntu-phone, in the
>> hope of reaching the widest interested audience as possible. However,
>> please reply to ubuntu-devel only.
>>
>> I want to bring to your attention the existence of a project which IMHO
>> would be very beneficial to Ubuntu (especially on embedded devices, but
>> not only): the application launcher originally developed for Maemo/MeeGo.
>>
>> In short, the main features that applauncherd bring to the system are:
>>  * faster application startup
>>  * support for single instance applications
>>  * splash screen while the application is starting up
>>
>> The recommended readings are these:
>>   http://apidocs.meego.com/1.0/mtf/launcher.html
>>   http://goo.gl/DjGCV
>>
>> In order to be used in Ubuntu, the software itself needs some porting,
>> to remove the dependencies to Qt4, X11, and the AEGIS security framework
>> used in MeeGo. Luckily though, these changes have already been made by
>> the Mer people, who ported the software to Qt5, removed the AEGIS stuff
>> and also simplified a bit the architecture (there isn't an applauncherd
>> daemon any more, but the invoked directly talks to the booster
>> processes). They also wrote a booster for speeding up the startup of
>> applications using QML components, and we could easily modify that to
>> use our Ubuntu SDK components instead.
>>
>> Their code is here:
>>   https://github.com/nemomobile/mapplauncherd
>>   https://github.com/nemomobile/mapplauncherd-qt
>>   https://github.com/nemomobile/mapplauncherd-booster-qtcomponents
>>
>> Please let me know what you think of this. IMHO it's a simple and
>> brilliant idea, it could be integrated with apparmor and also be used to
>> provide sane default callbacks for handling the application lifetime
>> state changes.
>>
>> I've never been directly involved in this project, but given how much I
>> dislike NIH, I'd be happy to collaborate with whoever wants to bring
>> this to Ubuntu.
>
> Hrm, since this forks instead of doing an exec, it probably doesn't
> handle kernel security mechanisms well, such as ASLR. I'm not sure how
> we would handle switching AppArmor policies either, or how well our DBus
> AppArmor integration would work.
>
> Our current plan is to use Upstart for application launching.
>
> Are there any benchmarks somewhere that show what the performance gains
> are on application startup using mapplauncherd?

That's a good point. I think application startup time will become
important in the future. However, right now, we need to make sure that
we have applications startup correctly.

Thomas

>
> Marc.
>
>
>
> --
> ubuntu-devel mailing list
> ubuntu-devel at lists.ubuntu.com
> Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel