Files
finit/libink
Joachim Wiberg 5cc41b3ba4 libink: take the match keys clients send without asking
A rule carrying sender, destination, or eavesdrop was refused whole,
and a peer whose AddMatch fails gets no signals at all.  That is a
poor trade for keys clients attach as a matter of course: better a
filter wider than asked for than a subscription that never happened.

They are accepted and ignored rather than honoured.  Widening costs
nothing here since Finit is the only sender on this bus, and what it
emits through the match table is state any peer that got this far may
already read.

argN and argNpath still take the whole rule down.  Honouring them
means parsing message bodies, and nothing asks for them yet.

Signed-off-by: Joachim Wiberg <troglobit@gmail.com>
2026-08-13 10:15:19 +02:00
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2026-08-13 09:28:26 +02:00
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2026-08-13 09:28:26 +02:00

libink — brokerless D-Bus for Finit

libink is a small C library implementing the D-Bus wire protocol, both the server and the client side, without a broker and without any dependency on libdbus, sd-bus, or GIO. It was born inside Finit to let PID 1 be a bus of its own: clients connect straight to the listening socket, authenticate with the standard SASL EXTERNAL handshake, and get kernel-authenticated credentials via SO_PEERCRED.

For what the bus exposes and how to talk to it, see the User Guide, D-Bus Integration. This file covers the library itself.

Status

libink is an internal implementation detail of Finit: built as a libtool convenience library, linked statically into finit and initctl, nothing installed. There is deliberately no ABI promise yet — that comes if/when libink is extracted into a project of its own. External D-Bus clients need none of this; the wire protocol is the compatibility surface, any standard D-Bus library works.

Layout

File Contents
server.c Listening socket, accept, peer credential capture
auth.c SASL EXTERNAL handshake, uid verification
connection.c Per-peer state machine, message framing
proto.c Wire header parse/build
marshal.c Body (de)marshalling: basic types, arrays, variants
dispatch.c Object tree, vtable registration, method dispatch
builtin.c org.freedesktop.DBus.* stock interfaces
match.c AddMatch/RemoveMatch rule parsing and signal filter
path.c systemd-style _HH object path encoding
client.c Outgoing connections, method calls, reply/signal wait
io.c Shared EINTR-resilient read/write loops

Public API symbols carry the link_* prefix (link.h), internal ones __* (internal.h). Method handlers are registered as vtables of link_method_t/link_property_t; the framework emits variant signatures from the property table so the declared type is the single source of truth.

The boundary to Finit is deliberate: nothing under libink/ includes a Finit header. All glue lives in src/dbus.c — object registration, signal emission from the service/condition/runlevel hook points, and the uev event loop bridge. initctl uses the client half of the same library, so one wire-format implementation serves both ends. If libink is ever spun out, that file is the cut line.

Testing

The test/dbus-*.sh suite exercises the library end to end against a live Finit in a namespace, driven by test/src/dbus-auth-client.c. Wire-format conformance against third-party tools (dbus-send, dbus-monitor) and fuzzing of the parsers are tracked as pre-merge work — this is PID 1's attack surface.