[Testers wanted] /dev/console cleanups

[Ed Schouten]

Hello Carlos,

* Carlos A. M. dos Santos <unixmania at gmail.com> wrote:
> The patched source builds and installs flawlessy. However I observed
> something that seems to be a regression. If I run either xconsole or
> xterm -C I only see kernel messages, even though my X startup (via
> XDM) changes the owner of /dev/console to the logged-in user. I mean,
> if I do some timg like "echo OK > /dev/console", the message is echoed
> on /dev/ttyv0, not by xconsole
> 
> This is the same problem reported by Jeff Blank on RELENG_7:
> 
> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2008-September/044949.html
> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2008-October/045885.html

It's nice to hear that the patch didn't break anything on your system. I
hope to receive more reviews, but I think I'll just commit it this
weekend (with small modifications).

About the /dev/console issues: Robert Watson and I discussed this some
time ago on IRC and what I did in HEAD (not RELENG_7) was that I changed
TIOCCONS not to take a look at the permissions of /dev/console, but we
changed it to use priv_check(). This means that right now you can only
call TIOCCONS as root. I can't really understand why the problem exists
on RELENG_7.

About making xconsole setuid: I've read the messages you mentioned, but
I think we could just alter console to call TIOCCONS and just drop
privileges. An even better solution would be to just get rid of TIOCCONS
and invent a better solution to capture syslog messages. I can't really
understand why we want to abuse TTY's to do this.

So I can't say we're working on this, but at least I can confirm the
issue.

-- 
 Ed Schouten <ed at 80386.nl>
 WWW: http://80386.nl/
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