Re: Xlock on login

[Ryan McDougall <NQG24419 nifty com>]

On Fri, 2005-28-01 at 13:59 +0100, Karel Demeyer wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I wanted to propose this as a feature request for GDM, but I'm not sure
> if it's the right place, therefor I ask it here.
> 
> Wouldn't it be copol if you could have GDM automaticly log in a specifed
> user (like it's possible now) but have the X-server locked before gnome
> starts up?  So, gnome will start up in te background but the Xserver
> would still be locked so noone can do stuff with your desktop before the
> password is entered.  I'd love this as  because I always save my gnome
> sessions, it takes some time to start up gnome.  Nowadays, I boot my
> computer, wait for GDM, enter my password and wait again.  It would be
> better to just boot my computer, do some stuff, enter my apssword and be
> able to work with it immediately.
> 
> What do you think about this ?  Are there security problems ?  Where
> should I propose this ?
> 
> Karel Demeyer
> http://gnometux.blogspot.com
> 

So essentially the goal here is to get a performance improvement by pre-
loading the GNOME session? Its an interesting hack, but it is
unfortunately just that.

I think the best place to put this pre-load optimization is the same
place Windows XP, (I think MacOSX,) and FC4 put it: On boot they read
into RAM a working set of files optimally arranged on disk (100MB should
take a couple seconds), so that (hopefully) starting GNOME should rarely
ever seek to disk.

Actually come to think about it, GDM might be a nice place to pre-cache
and $HOME related files, so that a GNOME session *never* has to touch
disk. I would like to see a disk profile of disk accesses during a GNOME
session start-up.

(Just to be clear for those not in the know, pre-caching is just as good
as "pre-running" because memory I/O is always the bottleneck)

Cheers,
Ryan