Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been heads down working on a new tool along with Patrick Griffis. The purpose of this tool is to make it easier to integrate IDEs and other tooling with GNU-based gadgets like phones, tablets, infotainment, and IoT devices.

Years ago I was working on a GNOME-integrated home router with davidz which sadly we never finished. One thing that was obvious to me in that moment of time was that I will not do another large scale project until I have better tooling. That was Builder’s genesis and device integration is what will make it truly useful to myself and others who love playing with GNU-friendly gadgets.

Now, building an IDE is a long process. There is a ton of code to write, trade-offs to work through, and persistence beyond what any reasonable programmer would voluntarily sign up for. But the ends justify the slog.

So what we’ve created is uninterestingly called “deviced”. It currently has three components. A deviced daemon lives on the target device that we’re interested in writing software for. A GObject-based libdeviced library provides access to discover and connect to devices and do interesting things on them. Lastly, devicectl is a readline-based command line tool that allows you to interact with these devices without having to write a program using libdeviced.

The APIs in libdeviced are appropriately abstracted so that we can provide different transports in the future. Currently, we only have network-based communication but we will implement a USB transport in the not-too-distant future. Other protocols such as SSH or custom micro-controllers can be added. Although something like SSH is more complex because it’d be the combination of both a protocol and how to run commands to get the intended effect, which is non-portable. It will be possible to support devices that do not run deviced, but that is currently out of scope.

To allow devices to be discover-able, deviced will broadcast it’s presence using mDNS on networks it is configured to listen (based on network-manager connection UUID). Long term my goal is that you can configure deviced access in Control Center, similar to “Sharing and Privacy”. The network protocol is rather simple as it’s just JSON-RPC over TLS with self-signed certificates. When a client connects to the daemon, a gnome-shell notification is presented allowing you to accept the connection. At that point, the client certificate is saved for future validation.

Our libdeviced library is GObject introspectable and should therefore work with a number of languages.

Right now, only Flatpak applications are supported, but we have abstractions to allow for contributions to support additional application layers like docker or plain old .desktop files. Currently you can push flatpak applications and runtimes to the device and install them and run them. If you have a new enough Flatpak, you can do delta updates.

It can even bridge multiple PTY devices for a shell, which isn’t really meant to be an SSH replacement, but more of a single abstraction we can use to be able to control a debugger and inferior from the IDE tooling.

There are still lots of little bugs to shake out and more bits to implement, but this is a pretty sweet 2-week proof of concept.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/chergert/deviced/

Here is a 20 second demo running on a single machine. It’s the same when using multiple machines except you get the notification on the programmable device rather than on your workstation. Obviously for IoT devices we’d need to create some sort of freedesktop notification bridge or alternate notification mechanism.

Anytime you work on a new project people will inevitably ask “why not just use XYZ”. In this case, I would expect both SSH and ADB to fall into that category. Most importantly, libdeviced is going to be about providing a single “remote device” abstraction for us in Builder. So it’s reasonable that we could abstract both of those systems from libdeviced. But neither of those provide the work-flow I envision for out-of-box experience, hence the deviced daemon. In the ADB case, it will be very difficult to get code upstream and released to distributions as it is increasingly unlikely our use-case is interesting to upstream. There were experimental patches to ADB a couple years ago to support flatpak so we didn’t take on this effort without considering our options. Ultimately, this prototype was to see the feasibility of making something that solves our problems while not locking us out of supporting other systems in the future.