Re: [Utopia] gnome-mount 0.3 is out

[Kay Sievers <kay sievers vrfy org>]

On Thu, Jan 12, 2006 at 09:55:32AM -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-01-12 at 14:31 +0100, Kay Sievers wrote:
> > > This might change sooner that later. I was talking to Matthew Garrett
> > > on IRC some days ago about him finishing the patch that makes
> > > hald run unprivileged but still exec helpers (addons, callouts, method
> > > invocations) from a helper process still running as root (using D-BUS
> > > in point to point mode between the two).  The reason, IIRC, was the
> > > desire to use the power management methods that HAL now offers.
> > 
> > What do you think will read volume labels an similar stuff from new
> > devices then?
> 
> But today all privileged access to a device happens in a helper called
> out from hald, no? That's in hald/linux2/probing and elsewhere.

Yes, most of it. Who will start add-ons that need privileges?

> There may be a few cases (reading battery info comes to mind) where we
> need to clean this up too; that's all part of the work of separating
> hald into two processes - the unprivileged one handling D-BUS requests
> and the uid 0 one that executes helpers. Don't you think this is nicer,
> we get less code running at uid 0 which is always good even if there are
> no real threats (still I'm waiting for Martin to point those out).

Sure, it's nicer, I never disagreed, but I didn't see a convincing
proposal that still works as expected. If we are going to do that than
we should reconsider my old proposal, to make the hal device store
generic and not part of the device handling. You didn't like the ipc
overhead that time, which is what this privilege split model will
introduce anyway.
I'm still can't really imagine, what will be left to the "unpriv.
main daemon" if we put everything into external privileged processes.
Then we can just rip out the store and make it generic for other
subsytems too, to put in their objects too and use all the nice
infrastructure like fdi files, callouts, ...

Thanks,
Kay