Xserver needs to run as "root" on Linux / was: Re: [Xorg] Server side widgets

[Jakub Piotr Cłapa]

Jon Smirl wrote:
> --- Torgeir Veimo <torgeir at pobox.com> wrote:
> 
>>On Mon, 2004-07-12 at 11:29 -0700, Jon Smirl wrote:
>>
>>>e idea being discussed is to use the kernel for login. Something like
>>>SysReq or Ctrl-Alt-Del would be used to interrupt the kernel. The
>>>kernel would then draw the login screen using a device drivers like
>>>drm/fbdev. As part of the login process the ownership of the device
>>>node would be transfered to the logged-in user.
>>
>>Wouldn't it be better to leave control to a separate program after a
>>sys-req event, like init, and use a special run-level? A separate
>>program could then handle both text mode and graphical login?
> 
> The idea of a kernel based login is that it is completely secure and
> can't be trojaned. A key that can't be intercepted is used to trigger
> login. The kernel catches this and clears/draws the screen in a way
> that can't be stopped. The keyboard is then directly read for the login
> data.

Looks really Windowish (and fishy) to me...

Why is this better than x/g/w/xdm? AFAIR from the beggining Unixes used 
(min)getty+login for logging in on text terminals and it works without 
problems (I can event change mingetty to fbgetty to get some fancy 
graphic into the framebuffer).
What make graphic consoles different?

-- 
Regrads,
Jakub Piotr Cłapa