| title | MobileOps Platform Architecture |
|---|---|
| category | Platform Documentation |
| layout | default |
| SPDX-License-Identifier | LGPL-2.1-or-later |
The MobileOps platform is a modern, cloud-native mobile operations framework designed for enterprise-scale mobile application management, AI-powered automation, and cross-platform deployment.
- Platform Launcher: Central control system for platform initialization and lifecycle management
- Component Provisioner: Dynamic provisioning and configuration of platform components
- Asset Manager: Centralized management of digital assets, models, and resources
- AI Core Manager: Manages AI inference engines, model loading, and resource allocation
- AI Shell Hook: Provides AI-powered shell enhancements and intelligent command suggestions
- Neural Network Engines: Support for various AI model types (LLM, Vision, Neural Networks)
- Chisel Container Runtime: Lightweight container management for mobile workloads
- QEMU VM Manager: Virtual machine lifecycle management for isolated environments
- Resource Orchestration: Dynamic resource allocation and scaling
- Network Configuration Manager: Advanced networking setup for containers and VMs
- Security Framework: Comprehensive security scanning and integrity verification
- Toolbox Integrity Checker: System-wide integrity monitoring and verification
- Build and Release System: Automated building, packaging, and deployment
- Plugin System: Extensible architecture for third-party integrations
- Testing Framework: Comprehensive testing suite with security and performance analysis
- System Log Collector: Centralized logging with real-time monitoring
- Performance Monitoring: Resource usage tracking and optimization
- Binary Update Manager: Secure update distribution with rollback capabilities
Each component operates as an independent service with well-defined APIs and responsibilities.
Components communicate through events and message queues for loose coupling.
Core platform can be extended through a robust plugin system.
Built for containerized deployment with Kubernetes and cloud provider integration.
- Platform Initialization: Platform launcher orchestrates component startup
- Resource Provisioning: Components request resources through the provisioner
- AI Processing: AI workloads are distributed across available compute resources
- Network Communication: All inter-component communication goes through the network layer
- Monitoring and Logging: All activities are logged and monitored for analysis
- Zero Trust Model: All components authenticate and authorize every interaction
- Encrypted Communication: TLS/SSL for all inter-component communication
- Integrity Verification: Continuous monitoring of system and component integrity
- Secure Updates: Cryptographically signed updates with rollback capabilities
- Horizontal Scaling: Components can be scaled independently based on demand
- Resource Optimization: AI-driven resource allocation and optimization
- Caching Strategies: Multi-level caching for frequently accessed resources
- Load Balancing: Intelligent load distribution across available resources
Full control deployment in enterprise data centers.
Elastic scaling in public cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP).
Seamless operation across on-premises and cloud resources.
Distributed deployment for low-latency mobile applications.
src/include/override/
- wrappers for libc and kernel headers
src/fundamental/
- may be used by all code in the tree
- may not use any code outside of
src/fundamental/
src/basic/
- may be used by all code in the tree
- may not use any code outside of
src/fundamental/andsrc/basic/
src/libsystemd/
- may be used by all code in the tree that links to
libsystem.so - may not use any code outside of
src/fundamental/,src/basic/, andsrc/libsystemd/
src/shared/
- may be used by all code in the tree, except for code in
src/basic/,src/libsystemd/,src/nss-*,src/login/pam_systemd.*, and files undersrc/journal/that end up inlibjournal-client.aconvenience library. - may not use any code outside of
src/fundamental/,src/basic/,src/libsystemd/,src/shared/
Code located in src/core/ implements the main logic of the systemd system (and user) service manager.
BPF helpers written in C and used by PID 1 can be found under src/core/bpf/.
The system and session manager supports a large number of unit settings. These can generally be configured in three ways:
- Via textual, INI-style configuration files called unit files
- Via D-Bus messages to the manager
- Via the
systemd-runandsystemctl set-propertycommands
From a user's perspective, the third is a wrapper for the second. To implement a new unit setting, it is necessary to support all three input methods:
- unit files are parsed in
src/core/load-fragment.c, with many simple and fixed-type unit settings being parsed by common helpers, with the definition in the generator filesrc/core/load-fragment-gperf.gperf.in - D-Bus messages are defined and parsed in
src/core/dbus-*.c systemd-runandsystemctl set-propertydo client-side parsing and translation into D-Bus messages insrc/shared/bus-unit-util.c
So that they are exercised by the fuzzing CI, new unit settings should also be listed in the text files under test/fuzz/fuzz-unit-file/.
Sources for the udev daemon and command-line tool (single binary) can be found under src/udev/.
Source files found under src/test/ implement unit-level testing, mostly for modules found in src/basic/ and src/shared/, but not exclusively.
Each test file is compiled in a standalone binary that can be run to exercise the corresponding module.
While most of the tests can be run by any user, some require privileges, and will attempt to clearly log about what they need (mostly in the form of effective capabilities).
These tests are self-contained, and generally safe to run on the host without side effects.
Ideally, every module in src/basic/ and src/shared/ should have a corresponding unit test under src/test/, exercising every helper function.
Fuzzers are a type of unit tests that execute code on an externally-supplied input sample.
Fuzzers are called fuzz-*.
Fuzzers for src/basic/ and src/shared live under src/fuzz/, and those for other parts of the codebase should be located next to the code they test.
Files under test/fuzz/ contain input data for fuzzers, one subdirectory for each fuzzer.
Some of the files are "seed corpora", i.e. files that contain lists of settings and input values intended to generate initial coverage, and other files are samples saved by the fuzzing engines when they find an issue.
When adding new input samples under test/fuzz/*/, please use some short-but-meaningful names.
Names of meson tests include the input file name and output looks awkward if they are too long.
Fuzzers are invoked primarily in three ways:
firstly, each fuzzer is compiled as a normal executable and executed for each of the input samples under test/fuzz/ as part of the test suite.
Secondly, fuzzers may be instrumented with sanitizers and invoked as part of the test suite (if -Dfuzz-tests=true is configured).
Thirdly, fuzzers are executed through fuzzing engines that tryto find new "interesting" inputs through coverage feedback and massive parallelization; see the links for oss-fuzz in Code quality.
For testing and debugging, fuzzers can be executed as any other program, including under valgrind or gdb.
Sources in test/TEST-* implement system-level testing for executables, libraries and daemons that are shipped by the project.
Most of those tests should be able to run via systemd-nspawn, which is orders-of-magnitude faster than qemu, but some tests require privileged operations like using dm-crypt or loopdev.
They are clearly marked if that is the case.
See test/integration-tests/README.md for more specific details.
Rules built in the static hardware database shipped by the project can be found under hwdb.d/.
Some of these files are updated automatically, some are filled by contributors.
Markdown files found under docs/ are automatically published on the systemd.io website using Github Pages.
A minimal unit test to ensure the formatting doesn't have errors is included in the meson test -C build/ github-pages run as part of the CI.
Manpages for binaries and libraries, and the DBUS interfaces, can be found under man/ and should ideally be kept in sync with changes to the corresponding binaries and libraries.
Translations files for binaries and daemons, provided by volunteers, can be found under po/ in the usual format.
They are kept up to date by contributors and by automated tools.
Presets (or templates from which they are generated) for various daemons and tools can be found under various directories such as
factory/, modprobe.d/, network/, presets/, rules.d/, shell-completion/, sysctl.d/, sysusers.d/, tmpfiles.d/.
tools/, coccinelle/, .github/, .semaphore/, .mkosi/ host various utilities and scripts that are used by maintainers and developers.
They are not shipped or installed.
The Service Manager takes configuration in the form of unit files, credentials, kernel command line options and D-Bus commands, and based on those manages the system and spawns other processes. It runs in system mode as PID1, and in user mode with one instance per user session.
When starting a unit requires forking a new process, configuration for the new process will be serialized and passed over to the new process, created via a posix_spawn() call.
This is done in order to avoid excessive processing after a fork() but before an exec(), which is against glibc's best practices and can also result in a copy-on-write trap.
The new process will start as the systemd-executor binary, which will deserialize the configuration and apply all the options (sandboxing, namespacing, cgroup, etc.) before exec'ing the configured executable.
┌──────┐posix_spawn() ┌───────────┐execve() ┌────────┐
│ PID1 ├─────────────►│sd-executor├────────►│program │
└──────┘ (memfd) └───────────┘ └────────┘