Re: [gdm-list] STDLOGIN support

[Alan Coopersmith <Alan Coopersmith Sun COM>]

I just answered Xavier's followup question on the Xorg mailing list:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2008-May/035753.html

Note that it doesn't restart the X server, just asks the X server to
setuid()/setgid() to the logged in user.

	-Alan Coopersmith-           alan coopersmith sun com
	 Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering


Brian Cameron wrote:
> Xavier:
> 
>> I see in the docs that this interface is supported in Solaris for
>> restarting the X sever as the login user. Where is the code that
>> implements this support, I looked around but it isn't obvious? Could
>> similar functionality (server restart as login user) be implemented
>> for other OSs, like Fedora?
> 
> This is only supported in GDM 2.20 and earlier.  GDM 2.22 doesn't yet
> support this kind of interface.  Solaris will patch the new GDM rewrite
> to continue using this interface.
> 
> At the moment, the interfaces for making this work are patched into
> Sun's Xserver code, and isn't generally available to other Xorg users.
> 
> I know that Alan Coopersmith of the Sun Xserver team has been planning
> to work with the upstream Xorg community to make this feature more
> general, so it can be supported on other platforms.  However, I know
> Alan has been busy and I am guessing he probably won't have time to
> work on this in the near future.  However, I think the security
> advantages of this sort of feature has obvious advantages, so it would
> be good to further encourage the Xorg project to consider adding a
> more supported public interface for doing this.  Might be good to
> make sure there is an enhancement request filed in the Xorg bugzilla
> database about this.
> 
> Brian