Plumbing needs an API: “libification”

Here are my slides and video from my talk “All Plumbing needs an API” from Linux Plumbers Conference 2012.

My thesis is we would improve the quality of our platform if we recognize the flaws in excessive use of other commandline tools by other tools, and worked towards more APIs and libraries for low-level parts of the Linux platform. There are many reasons given in the talk I don’t want to rehash; here are some more thoughts since I gave the talk:

First, this is not a push for every single instance of one program being called by another to be replaced by an API. But on the spectrum of cmdline-parsing vs libraries, I think we are too far towards the former, and should make an effort to shift dramatically towards the latter.

Second, we can take a “pave the cowpaths” approach toward this — we should first libify those tools most commonly parsed by other tools. I’ve been helping out on liblvm, a library for LVM (whose tools are unquestionably over-parsed.) There are also many other network, storage, and system configuration tools that are candidates for libification.

The move towards virtualization & cloud computing has led to many tools formerly configured directly by the sysadmin now being configured by other tools. Broadening the coverage of our system-level management APIs will improve Linux’s flexibility and reliability as a virtualized OS.