logind: introduce session-devices

System Internals / systemd - David Herrmann [gmail.com] - 17 September 2013 17:15 UTC

A session-device is a device that is bound to a seat and used by a session-controller to run the session. This currently includes DRM, fbdev and evdev devices. A session-device can be created via RequestDevice() on the dbus API of the session. You can drop it via ReleaseDevice() again. Once the session is destroyed or you drop control of the session, all session-devices are automatically destroyed.

Session devices follow the session "active" state. A device can be active/running or inactive/paused. Whenever a session is not the active session, no session-device of it can be active. That is, if a session is not in foreground, all session-devices are paused. Whenever a session becomes active, all devices are resumed/activated by logind. If it fails, a device may stay paused.

With every session-device you request, you also get a file-descriptor back. logind keeps a copy of this fd and uses kernel specific calls to pause/resume the file-descriptors. For example, a DRM fd is muted by logind as long as a given session is not active. Hence, the fd of the application is also muted. Once the session gets active, logind unmutes the fd and the application will get DRM access again. This, however, requires kernel support. DRM devices provide DRM-Master for synchronization, evdev devices have EVIOCREVOKE (pending on linux-input-ML). fbdev devices do not provide such synchronization methods (and never will). Note that for evdev devices, we call EVIOCREVOKE once a session gets inactive. However, this cannot be undone (the fd is still valid but mostly unusable). So we reopen a new fd once the session is activated and send it together with the ResumeDevice() signal.

With this infrastructure in place, compositors can now run without CAP_SYS_ADMIN (that is, without being root). They use RequestControl() to acquire a session and listen for devices via udev_monitor. For every device they want to open, they call RequestDevice() on logind. This returns a fd which they can use now. They no longer have to open the devices themselves or call any privileged ioctls. This is all done by logind. Session-switches are still bound to VTs. Hence, compositors will get notified via the usual VT mechanisms and can cleanup their state. Once the
VT switch is acknowledged as usual, logind will get notified via sysfs and pause the old-session's devices and resume the devices of the new session.

To allow using this infrastructure with systems without VTs, we provide notification signals. logind sends PauseDevice("force") dbus signals to the current session controller for every device that it pauses. And it sends ResumeDevice signals for every device that it resumes. For seats with VTs this is sent _after_ the VT switch is acknowledged. Because the compositor already acknowledged that it cleaned-up all devices. However, for seats without VTs, this is used to notify the active compositor that the session is about to be deactivated. That is, logind sends PauseDevice("force") for each active device and then performs the session-switch. The session-switch changes the "Active" property of the session which can be monitored by the compositor. The new session is activated and the ResumeDevice events are sent.

For seats without VTs, this is a forced session-switch. As this is not backwards-compatible (xserver actually crashes, weston drops the related devices, ..) we also provide an acknowledged session-switch. Note that this is never used for sessions with VTs. You use the acknowledged
VT-switch on these seats.

An acknowledged session switch sends PauseDevice("pause") instead of PauseDevice("force") to the active session. It schedules a short timeout and waits for the session to acknowledge each of them with PauseDeviceComplete(). Once all are acknowledged, or the session ran out of time, a PauseDevice("force") is sent for all remaining active devices and the session switch is performed. Note that this is only partially implemented, yet, as we don't allow multi-session without VTs, yet. A follow up commit will hook it up and implemented the acknowledgements+timeout.

The implementation is quite simple. We use major/minor exclusively to identify devices on the bus. On RequestDevice() we retrieve the udev_device from the major/minor and search for an existing "Device" object. If no exists, we create it. This guarantees us that we are notified whenever the device changes seats or is removed.

We create a new SessionDevice object and link it to the related Session and Device. Session->devices is a hashtable to lookup SessionDevice objects via major/minor. Device->session_devices is a linked list so we can release all linked session-devices once a device vanishes.

Now we only have to hook this up in seat_set_active() so we correctly change device states during session-switches. As mentioned earlier, these are forced state-changes as VTs are currently used exclusively for multi-session implementations.

Everything else are hooks to release all session-devices once the controller changes or a session is closed or removed.

118ecf3 logind: introduce session-devices
Makefile.am | 2 +
src/login/logind-device.c | 4 +
src/login/logind-device.h | 2 +
src/login/logind-seat.c | 7 +-
src/login/logind-session-dbus.c | 126 +++++++++++
src/login/logind-session-device.c | 451 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
src/login/logind-session-device.h | 59 +++++
src/login/logind-session.c | 27 +++
src/login/logind-session.h | 2 +
src/shared/missing.h | 13 ++
10 files changed, 692 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

Upstream: github.com

  • Share