Thank you Marcel, that was a very thorough answer.
cheers,
Kris
Marcel Holtmann wrote:
Hi Kris,
Please forgive my ignorance in advance since I'm fairly new to this area
and my understanding of connection/network management tools is still
fairly shallow.
At first glance there seem to be a lot of architectural similarities
between connman and network manager. Both are daemons that attempt to
keep the connection up. Both support plugins and communicate with
clients and other helpers using dbus and such.
I'm trying to understand what the key differences are between connman
and network manager. To put it another way, what are the problems that
connman is meant to solve that are not solved by network manager?
so the basic idea of Network Manager and ConnMan are the same. Both will
give a system to manage your Internet connections. However the key
differences are in the design philosophies.
ConnMan is a full modular system. The core daemon only provides the
framework. All implementation details (like WiFi, Bluetooth, DHCP, IP,
PolicyKit etc.) are optional and realized via plugins. This allows us to
add support for new technologies quickly or replace current plugins with
alternate solutions.
ConnMan targets at embedded system and thus we are trying to cut down
the dependency chain massively. It depends on libglib-2.0 (core only)
and libdbus (low-level only). Everything else is optional. It doesn't
depend on HAL or DeviceKit and does its device detection directly via
RTNL and libudev (optional).
ConnMan will be able to fully work without any kind of UI or extra
daemon present. This is different to Network Manager where at least one
settings daemon has to be present (system or session). This means that
we try to put as less intelligence as possible in the UI. This way it is
possible to easily and quickly replace the UI without re-writing half of
the implementation.
ConnMan is designed to work on small embedded system without any kind to
networking scripts or preparations for network setup. This means that it
can be used really early in the boot process and will also setup things
like loopback devices. This is really important for a fast boot.
ConnMan has a complete different internal handling of the representation
of devices, networks, connections and other details. It is fully
flexible and easy to extend. Check my Linux-Kongress presentation if you
need some more details or nice graphics.
However ConnMan also has things in common with Network Manager. For
example both systems are using wpa_supplicant for managing WiFi devices,
but the internals are completely different.
Regards
Marcel
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