[Jackit-devel] Re: [Icecast] ices-kh dropping jack ports unexpectedly

[Karl Heyes]

On Mon, 2004-10-18 at 21:04, Jack O'Quin wrote:

> > > 
> > > There are several ways to gain realtime privileges.  Running as root
> > > is the simplest, but perhaps the worst solution.  
> > 
> > Just to be clear, with ices, you can drop to a nominated user after the
> > realtime scheduler is selected. Running as root after that is not
> > required.
> 
> That does not solve the problem at all.  If you run jackd as root, you
> must run *all* JACK clients as root.  They are not all coded that way,
> and some cannot be.  Neither they nor jackd should be entrusted with
> God-like superuser powers.

I can't really comment on jackd itself, as I haven't looked that much
into it.  If running jackd as root requires client apps to also run as
root then that is a pretty bad issue. I would of thought that running
jackd as a realtime process (whether root or not) would be an important
consideration.

What I can say is that ices tries to acquire realtime scheduling if
enabled (default is yes) which may or may not fail, but if root is used
and an alternative user is stated in the xml then ices will change to
that user, and therefore _NOT_ run as root anymore. This has been a
common approach for unix apps.

If you use some other mechanism like capabilities then requiring root
for realtime scheduling may not be needed, but that is platform
specific.

karl.