Here are some facts I gathered last time Varlink was discussed: Varlink is produced by Red Hat, apparently - or by people who use Red Hat things: both examples

Here are some facts I gathered last time Varlink was discussed: Varlink is produced by Red Hat, apparently - or by people who use Red Hat things: both examples (DNF, Podman) are Redhat projects. It seems to be an effort to apply the Interface Definition Language model to UNIX daemons/services/tools by adding a new “standard IO file descriptor” for structured IO using a typed interface, as opposed to the current STDIN/STDOUT/STDERR which are existing un typed byte streams. Using a new FD instead of agreeing to layer Varlink protocol over STDIO means that existing programs can adopt Varlink without breaking backwards compat or making negotiation even more complicated. EDIT: Podman removed Varlink https://podman.io/blogs/2020/01/17/podman-new-api.html https://podman.io/blogs/2020/01/17/podman-new-api.html