A Root-less X Server Nears Reality

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A Root-less X Server Nears Reality

One of the benefits of moving the different graphics hardware drivers over to using kernel mode-setting, an in-kernel GPU memory manager (whether it be GEM or TTM), and other newer X innovations is the possibility of now running the X Server without root privileges. By doing so, this of course improves the security since this very large chunk of code is no longer running with all of these high-privileged rights. Due to now living in a KMS-enabled world, at least on the Intel and ATI side (the NVIDIA side is still slowly but surely coming via Nouveau), it's rather easy to get the X Server running without any special rights...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NzM2MA

[curaga]

Confusing headline, I thought root-less as in without a root window..

[hax0r]

Confusing headline, I thought root-less as in without a root window..

I do not see anything confusing about it. I wonder what will nvidia do, nouveau's KMS is rather in good shape, all of my cards work flawlessly (260 GTX ~ 9600GT ~ 6600GT ~ 8800GT).

[M1AU]

Come on Nvidia, go for it damn it.

[krogy]

I do not see anything confusing about it. I wonder what will nvidia do, nouveau's KMS is rather in good shape, all of my cards work flawlessly (260 GTX ~ 9600GT ~ 6600GT ~ 8800GT).

i thought nvidia was not involved at all in nouvueau...

[hax0r]

i thought nvidia was not involved at all in nouvueau...

Hmm who said that they are, or somebody misunderstood me?

[md1032]

The NVIDIA driver just needs access to the /dev/nvidia* files.

[Ex-Cyber]

I do not see anything confusing about it.

The term "rootless" has a particular meaning with respect to X servers, and that meaning has nothing to do with the superuser. It's exactly as curaga says.

[gregy]

OK, am I missing something here? I use Gentoo linux and binary nvidia drivers. I am able to run X as a user (without root privileges) right now.

[slashgrin]

OK, am I missing something here? I use Gentoo linux and binary nvidia drivers. I am able to run X as a user (without root privileges) right now.

The X executable has its setuid bit set in most distributions.

E.g.

jeff@tony:~$ stat /usr/bin/X
  File: `/usr/bin/X'
  Size: 10472     	Blocks: 24         IO Block: 4096   regular file
Device: fc00h/64512d	Inode: 593864      Links: 1
Access: (6755/-rwsr-sr-x)  Uid: (    0/    root)   Gid: (    0/    root)
Access: 2009-05-02 13:13:07.000000000 +1000
Modify: 2009-04-03 18:44:01.000000000 +1100
Change: 2009-05-02 13:03:58.000000000 +1000