Re: [Utopia] is gmv only ment for mountable stuff?

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Tue, 2004-08-03 at 10:02 -0700, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="Robert Love">
> 
> > HAL does this now via callouts.
> > 
> > It works great, but it runs things as root and not as the user.  I like
> > the current delineation between system and user-level, so I suppose one
> > idea is to add per-(logged in)-user callouts.
> 
> Does HAL still have to run as root?
> 

Presently HAL run as root; we have to as we require read-only access to
device nodes (polling for media, identifying filesystems etc.) and other
stuff (ioctl's, listening on the netlink socket). The other big thing is
that we really want to be able to spawn callouts running as root so OS
vendors can maintain system configuration when devices appear, disappear
and change.

However, there's a patch in my INBOX though that makes HAL drop all
privileges except for the one's that we need (using POSIX capabilities)
but it still doesn't solve the spawn callout situation. The patch is a
bit specific to Debian though.

David