RFC: what to do with ums when the X server is not suid root ?

[Andrew Lutomirski]

On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 10:40 AM, Matthew Garrett <mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 10:19:30AM -0800, Andrew Lutomirski wrote:
>
>> Does uvesafb actually work?  I submitted a patch to the uvesafb kernel
>> driver a few months back, and not only is the upstream link [1][2] to
>> the v86d helper dead, but no one on the dri-devel list answered my
>> request to see if anyone had a copy.  Fedora does not appear to
>> package a copy (at least yum whatprovides '*/v86d' doesn't come up
>> with anything).  This means that I got a patch into upstream drm and
>> that it's quite possible that no one (or maybe a grand total of one
>> person) has ever tested.
>
> It'd be pretty straightforward to re-implement the helper if it's
> vanished entirely - we haven't retired libx86, and the rest is pretty
> trivial.

OTOH, if it has indeed vanished entirely, then maybe we could argue
that there can't be any users and therefore it's okay if the driver
stops working in F21.

Going forward, if the simpledrm stuff ever starts being fully
functional, then it should provide a working, if rather crappy, way to
get fixed-resolution graphics running on any new-enough system.

--Andy