Mogwai allows systems to take advantage of reduced cost bandwidth at off-peak times of day. It provides a monitoring daemon which checks bandwidth usage, a scheduling daemon which prioritises downloads to minimise cost, and a tariff library which describes different data plans.
All the library APIs are currently unstable and are likely to change wildly.
The architecture of Mogwai is designed to allow applications and services to voluntarily schedule their downloads according to a system-wide download policy. The policy can take things like the user’s internet tariff, the metered status of the current connection, or the amount of battery power left, into account. In future, it might also take into account the download history, for example by checking the user is not near their limit of free download capacity for this time period.
This policy is implemented by mogwai-scheduled, a system daemon which
applications can talk to over D-Bus (it takes the well-known name
com.endlessm.MogwaiSchedule1). If an application wants to do a download, it
creates a ‘schedule entry’ in Mogwai, containing details about the download
(such as its estimated size). The application then waits for mogwai-scheduled
to set the schedule entry’s DownloadNow property to true — at that point, the
application is free to start the download.
Note that the download happens inside the application’s address space:
mogwai-scheduled cannot actually do any network operations itself. This is
deliberate: providing support for every kind of network request and
authentication that an application might want would be too difficult and error
prone; and doing network operations from a system daemon would provide an easy
escalation vector for any system compromise.
mogwai-scheduled may set DownloadNow to false again in future, and at that
point the application must pause its download (if it hasn’t already finished).
This is typically because a higher-priority download has pre-empted it.
- gio-2.0 ≥ 2.57.1
- glib-2.0 ≥ 2.57.1
- gobject-2.0 ≥ 2.57.1
- libsoup-3.0 or libsoup-2.4 ≥ 2.42
- systemd
The daemon components of Mogwai are licensed under the LGPL. The libraries are also licensed under the LGPL. See COPYING for more details.
Bug reports and patches should be reported by e-mail to one of the authors or filed in GitLab:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pwithnall/mogwai
- Philip Withnall [email protected]
- https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pwithnall/mogwai