D-Bus

In computing, D-Bus or DBus is an inter-process communication (IPC) and remote procedure call (RPC) mechanism that allows communication between multiple computer programs (that is, processes) concurrently running on the same machine. D-Bus was developed as part of the freedesktop.org project, initiated by Havoc Pennington from Red Hat to standardize services provided by Linux desktop environments such as GNOME and KDE.

The freedesktop.org project also developed a free and open-source software library called libdbus, as a reference implementation of the specification. This library is often confused with the D-Bus itself. Other implementations of the D-Bus client library also exist, such as GDBus (GNOME), QtDBus (Qt/KDE), dbus-java and sd-bus (part of systemd).

Overview

D-Bus is an IPC mechanism initially designed to replace the software component communications systems used by GNOME and KDE Linux desktop environments (CORBA and DCOP respectively). The components of these desktop environments are normally distributed in many processes, each one providing only a few —usually one— service. These services may be used by regular client applications or by other components of the desktop environment to perform their tasks.