[Discuss] Debian adds another systemd dependency, Busybox drops it

[bogstad at pobox.com (Bill Bogstad)]

On Sat, Nov 7, 2015 at 2:43 AM, Mike Small <smallm at sdf.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 06, 2015 at 10:47:30PM -0500, Bill Bogstad wrote:
>> On Fri, Nov 6, 2015 at 9:10 AM, Rich Pieri <richard.pieri at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Tangentially, we've had genuinely unprivileged X servers for a long time.
>> > VNC's standalone X servers do not require root and to the best of my
>> > knowledge never have. Combined with DirectVNC, a Linux framebuffer VNC
>> > client, and you can have X without root without systemd hackery.
>>
>> True.   But I think most people want X servers that take advantages of
>> all the graphics acceleration features in modern graphics cards.
>> Those X servers have in my experience usually required running them as
>> root.
>
> OpenBSD's privilege separated X uses acceleration though doesn't
> yet support as many graphics chipsets as X on Linux. E.g. Nouveau
> (for nvidia) hasn't made it over yet, but perhaps that will change
> now that someone at NetBSD is working on it.

Interesting, maybe X Window System developers for Linux systems didn't
care enough about the potential issues of privileged X servers to
spend the time.  That wouldn't be surprising.   Most Linux users are
probably going to buy their graphics hardware based on
performance/support not security concerns so said developers would
have little pressure to change their priorities.  I confess that I
haven't really thought about it myself.   Given that I run Linux
rather than OpenBSD, I've already made the decision to value something
else more than ultimate security.

Bill Bogstad