Re: 3.6 Feature: Lock Screen

[Stef Walter <stefw gnome org>]

On 04/27/2012 01:00 AM, Jasper St. Pierre wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 26, 2012 at 6:41 PM, Tomas Frydrych
> <tf+lists gnome r-finger com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> On 25/04/12 23:38, Marina Zhurakhinskaya wrote:
>>> Technically, the code for fading out the screen and displaying the
>>> lock screen when the user becomes active again will be added to GNOME
>>> Shell, and the gnome-screensaver will no longer be used.
>>
>> There are security implications of this proposed change. In the event
>> the Shell crashes, you cannot make any assumptions, and therefore any
>> guarantees, about how much of the state will be recovered, and hence
>> that lock will not be compromised. Even if the Shell does restart
>> successfully, the content of the desktop is visible for the time it
>> takes the Shell to restart, which is by no means negligible.
>>
>> Considering how often Mutter crashes (I see about 3-4 crashes an hour),
> 
> Bug references? We should not be crashing 3-4 times per hour.

3-4 times a day for me. Here are some bugs, they're in the Red Hat
bugzilla because they were filed with Fedora Abrt. These hardly
represent the number of crashes though, because nearly always "the
backtrace isn't usable".

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=791130

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=809365

FWIW on some of my machines, the screensaver is already pretty funny
security-wise. When coming back from sleep. It shows the desktop screen
for several seconds before locking the screen. Sometimes it only locks
one monitor. Sometimes the lock dialog isn't visible. I haven't started
to try and debug these issues.

I guess one way of looking at that is that hopefully the Lock screen
refresh will solve some of these problems :P

Cheers,

Stef