[Xorg] The big multiconsole nasty

[Egbert Eich]

Keith Packard writes:
 > 
 > Around 1 o'clock on Jul 7, Michel =?ISO-8859-1?Q?D=E4nzer?= wrote:
 > 
 > > I basically agree, let's not pretend a root daemon is all that much
 > > better though. Either will probably be better in some aspects, worse in
 > > others.
 > 
 > I concur with this sentiment -- any code directly manipulating the device
 > registers runs a reasonable risk of corrupting the machine state.  This
 > makes the X server or this proposed daemon equal in many ways to the
 > kernel.
 > 
For HW access this is certainly true, but it also deosn't make the kernel
a better choice than user land.
On the other hand a sloppy written user land code will probably just 
segfault while similar flaws in a kernel module may mess up your entire
system.

 > One thing I'd like to see is a general reduction of code that runs in the
 > same address space as the 'scary' bits.  Starting with the device
 > initialization and mode selection logic makes good sense as none of that is
 > particularily performance sensitive.  This should give us significant
 > freedom of choice in implementation.

>From a security point of view it is certainly the correct apporach to 
separate the scary parts from the rest of the Xserver.

Egbert.