AQUA

Mono-repo for all things AQUA 🏄

What is AQUA?

The fundamental idea behind AQUA is to create a "utopia" of sorts for applications, in which they can access virtual devices (VDEVs) through standardized interfaces, regardless of which machine they are physically located on. The AQUA infrastructure (GrapeVine, the KOS, and VDRIVERs) is what handles the actual implementation of these interfaces and sharing these over the network.

You can read more about AQUA's architecture in the architecture document.

Basic build instructions

AQUA requires the Bob the Builder buildsystem to build.

To build all components, you can simply run:

bob build

Bob will create a temporary installation prefix for you, in which you can enter a shell with bob sh.

Running a demo can be done by passing the path to the demo's directory to bob run's -C option:

bob run -C demos/cam

(In fact, you don't need to have run a build step first to run a demo; it'll do this for you.)

If you wish to install AQUA to your system, run:

bob install

Using GrapeVine

GrapeVine is automatically built when running bob build from the root directory. You can run it by running gvd (the GrapeVine daemon), either as-is if you've installed it or with bob run, e.g.:

bob run gvd -i wg0 &

In the example, it's being run on the wg0 network interface, which represents a WireGuard VPN interface. It is recommended that you use a VPN for communication between devices on the GrapeVine, and in fact this is the only possible way to communicate between devices on different networks.

You can run gvd on a physical interface, but do note that all traffic is unencrypted and unauthenticated, and thus anyone on the same local network will be able to participate in and spy on the GrapeVine.

Guide du routard

Here is a list of the components and their respective subdirectories held within this repo:

Path	Description
demos	Demo apps that showcase AQUA's capabilities and serve as simple examples.
docs	Documentation for AQUA.
external	Any external dependencies which can't directly be depended on.
gv	GrapeVine sources for gvd (GrapeVine daemon) and libgv.
kos	KOS sources, i.e. platform-specific "glue" to run AQUA apps and interact with VDEVs and GrapeVine.
lib	C library AQUA apps can use to facilitate communication with the KOS and VDEVs.
lib/bindings	Language specific bindings to the C library.
tests	E2E tests for AQUA.
vdev	VDEV driver sources. VDEVs are the virtual drivers that allow AQUA apps to interact with hardware or other some software.

More detailed information may be found in the READMEs of each subdirectory respectively.

Older versions

At some point in the future, I'd also like to clean up all previous versions of AQUA and bring their history into this repo. What's in here currently would then be rebased on top of the old history.

This could be done either by keeping this repo, either by hijacking aqua-kos (as it's been around the longest) and deleting this one.

The histories between AQUA-3.x-SDL-window-KOS and aqua-kos don't overlap so they are fine, but SDL2-AQUA-KOS was developed at some point in parallel to aqua-kos for some reason. It seems like this turned into something similar to what would become aqua-unix however so maybe that could count towards its history.