Xserver needs to run as "root" on Linux / was: Re: [Xorg] Server side widgets

[Alan Cox]

On Mer, 2004-07-14 at 16:45, Ralph Thomas wrote:
> Then you could have some daemon listen to "/dev/keyboard-special" for
> ctrl+alt+delete or whatever and then issue the "Exclusive" ioctl and
> do it's secret password and username stuff - once it had done that it
> could issue the "NonExclusive" ioctl.

The current approach is actually simpler. If you enable SAK then when
SAK is hit every process connected to that console is disconnected from
it and generally dies. Init then spawns a new getty.

The only area this breaks down is with X because if you just kill off X
bad stuff occurs right now. Once the mode handling support is in the
kernel then when X dies the fb layer either directly or via a user mode
helper run from hotplug will sort the mess out.