Description of problem: the currently logged account can of course access the main display, but other accounts (e.g. root) are not authorized. It used to be possible to add them by > xauth +SI:localhost:root Being able to add root is fairly important---some GUI admin tools need root access (e.g. disk space analyzer, etc). Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): xorg-x11-server-utils-7.7-23.fc27.x86_64 How reproducible: every time Steps to Reproduce: 1.xauth +SI:localhost:root Actual results: localhost:root being added to access control list X Error of failed request: BadValue (integer parameter out of range for operation) Major opcode of failed request: 109 (X_ChangeHosts) Value in failed request: 0xe Serial number of failed request: 7 Current serial number in output stream: 9 and root is NOT added to access control list Expected results: root is added to access control list
The call chain is #0 changehost (mode=0 '\000', host=0x7fffffffdc70, dpy=0x555555758260) at Host.c:76 #1 XAddHost (dpy=0x555555758260, host=0x7fffffffdc70) at Host.c:109 #2 0x0000555555555df8 in change_host (dpy=0x555555758260, name=0x7fffffffe1a2 "localhost:root", add=1) at xhost.c:415 #3 0x0000555555555348 in main (argc=2, argv=0x7fffffffde58) at xhost.c:269 change_host is called with arg="si:localhost:root", and then sets up the siaddr and ha structures > 413 ha.address = (char *) &siaddr; > 415 rc = XAddHost(dpy,&ha); There seems to be a confusion as to what ha.address is, though: the above code implies that it's a pointer to the siaddr structure, but Xlib.h:341 defines the third field of XHostAddress as char*, so the above code misconstructs the ha argument for XAddHost: the fields of siaddr are miscast as characters in a string. I think line 413 should be > ha.address = (char *) &siaddr.name;
The running-GUI-as-root-is-bad issue notwithstanding, I personally need to run GUIs as different non-privileged users, e.g. for testing and administration purposes. There's more discussion on this in [1274451] and https://pagure.io/system-config-language The 'xhost' method used to work and it only seems broken because of trivial programming issues, not some large-scale policy problem.
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