Re: Supervisor mode & multitasking

[Mario Becroft <mb@tos.pl.net>]

On Fri, 20 Feb 1998, Konrad Kokoszkiewicz wrote:

> I am seeing it this way:
> 
> - GEM should run as root. BTW. I'd like to have an AES daemon, which
>   activates only if a graphical shell (like Thing) is started.
> - GEM starts the shell (desktop). The desktop is also root.
> - the desktop executes some sort of GEM login, then switches uid/gid
>   to the selected one.
> 
> So I think it might be useful to incorporate login code to Thing desktop
> (displaying MODAL dialog box at the beginning).

You should look at GEM-Init, which does this already.

It seems to me that it would be foolish to incorporate the login process
into the shell. With GEM-Init the login process is separate, which seems
much better to me.

I don't use GEM-Init myself, however, since I'm the only user who ever
uses GEM and I just use it as root. And I suspect this is how almost
everyone uses it... until GEM can run on a remote terminal it will be
unusual to need it any other way, I believe.

> This way we can avoid rewriting the whole GEM for multiuser, just to fix
> the desktop. The question is, what to do with XBIOS. Shall be local user
> allowed to use it (for playing mp2 for example)?

I guess it would be sensible to allow only root to access XBIOS (but I
have not looked into this in any detail).

-- 
Mario Becroft                        Auckland, New Zealand
mb@tos.pl.net                    http://www.pl.net/~mario/      |\__/,|   (`\
Tariland, Atari Support in New Zealand                        _.|o o  |_   ) )
tariland@tos.pl.net     http://www.pl.net/~mario/tariland/ --(((---(((--------