non root X

[Dave Airlie]

On Fri, 2009-08-07 at 16:42 -0400, Casey Dahlin wrote:
> On 08/06/2009 01:26 AM, Dave Airlie wrote:
> > On Mon, 2009-08-03 at 15:08 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> >> Hi
> >>
> >> A few days back I ran into
> >>
> >> http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel/2009-July/001293.html
> >>
> >> I am wondering, since we are already using KMS in most places in Fedora,
> >> how far are we from achieving this by default in a Fedora release?
> > 
> > non-root X is a big security hole at the moment, and until we get
> > revoke() support in the kernel, we can probably move X to running as a
> > special user, and maybe once we get revoke to running as the real user.
> > 
> > However it doesn't solve the issue how we know we need or don't need
> > root since X only figures out what graphics drivers are needed after
> > starting, so if you needed a non-kms gpu driver we wouldn't know
> > until after we'd started as non-root.
> > 
> > Dave.
> > 
> 
> Why can't we just start as root or with the setuid bit, and use the standard set*uid() calls to drop what we don't need once we know what we're doing?
> 

We have to undo some stuff when X exits.

Dave.