Arch Linux

obap74

Member

Registered: 2021-03-18

Posts: 99

Xorg is running as root?

I was reading the Xorg Arch Wiki page and the Root-less Xorg section hold my attention.

I have two Arch installs on two different machines (one desktop and a laptop) with X11 and KDE Plasma. I also have Gentoo with KDE Plasma installed on the desktop. I use SDDM and X the desktop environment is started with

# systemctl enable sddm.service

on all the installs.

• On my Arch installs (both desktop and laptop):

  ❯ ps -o user $(pgrep Xorg)
        USER
        root

• On  my Gentoo install:

  ❯ ps -o user $(pgrep Xorg)
        USER
        obap74
        obap74
        obap74
        obap74

I tried  to add

needs_root_rights = no

in

/etc/X11/Xwrapper.config

as suggested on the wiki but of course it doesn't make any difference since I'm not starting X with xinitrc but with SDDM. I couldn't find any related information on the SDDM Arch Wiki page.

Xorg running as root doesn't sound right to me. Did I miss something or is this the default behavior on Arch considering Xorg is running as my regular user on my Gentoo install with similar setup?

Thanks.

Last edited by obap74 (2022-08-26 09:47:52)

Lone_Wolf

Administrator

From: Netherlands, Europe

Registered: 2005-10-04

Posts: 15,276

Re: Xorg is running as root?

please remove the trailing / from the wiki link so it works as intended.

There appears to be an ssdm problem with rootless X on archlinux, see https://github.com/sddm/sddm/issues/1502

---

Disliking systemd intensely, but not satisfied with alternatives so focusing on taming systemd.

clean chroot building not flexible enough ?
Try clean chroot manager by graysky

obap74

Member

Registered: 2021-03-18

Posts: 99

Re: Xorg is running as root?

please remove the trailing / from the wiki link so it works as intended.

Done, sorry.

There appears to be an ssdm problem with rootless X on archlinux, see https://github.com/sddm/sddm/issues/1502

Thank you. Indeed, SDDM on Arch is at version 0.19.0 and on Gentoo it's still at 0.18.1-r6 so I guess that's a regression introduced with 0.19.0.

Also found (CVE-2020-28049) - <x11-misc/sddm-0.18.1-r6: Privilege escalation (CVE-2020-28049) which seems to be the reason why 0.19.0 isn't available on Gentoo for now.