logind: add session controllers

System Internals / systemd - David Herrmann [gmail.com] - 17 September 2013 11:33 UTC

A session usually has only a single compositor or other application that controls graphics and input devices on it. To avoid multiple applications from hijacking each other's devices or even using the devices in parallel, we add session controllers.

A session controller is an application that manages a session. Specific API calls may be limited to controllers to avoid others from getting unprivileged access to restricted resources. A session becomes a controller by calling the RequestControl() dbus API call. It can drop it
via ReleaseControl().

logind tracks bus-names to release the controller once an application closes the bus. We use the new bus-name tracking to do that. Note that during ReleaseControl() we need to check whether some other session also tracks the name before we remove it from the bus-name tracking list.

Currently, we only allow one controller at a time. However, the public API does not enforce this restriction. So if it makes sense, we can allow multiple controllers in parallel later. Or we can add a "scope" parameter, which allows a different controller for graphics-devices, sound-devices and whatever you want. Note that currently you get -EBUSY if there is already a controller. You can force the RequestControl() call (root-only) to drop the current controller and recover the session during an emergency. To recover a seat, this is not needed, though. You can simply create a new session or force-activate it.

To become a session controller, a dbus caller must either be root or the same user as the user of the session. This allows us to run a session compositor as user and we no longer need any CAP_SYS_ADMIN.

ae5e06b logind: add session controllers
src/login/logind-dbus.c | 8 +++++++
src/login/logind-session-dbus.c | 42 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
src/login/logind-session.c | 48 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
src/login/logind-session.h | 6 +++++
src/login/logind.c | 10 ++++++++
5 files changed, 114 insertions(+)

Upstream: github.com


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