Bug 4422

Summary: /dev/dri/card* should be in group "video" by default
Product: xorg Reporter: Petr Baudis <pasky>
Component: Server/GeneralAssignee: Xorg Project Team <xorg-team>
Status: RESOLVED NOTOURBUG QA Contact: Xorg Project Team <xorg-team>
Severity: normal    
Priority: high CC: dberkholz, pasky
Version: 6.8.2   
Hardware: x86 (IA32)   
OS: Linux (All)   
URL: http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=63580
Whiteboard:
i915 platform: i915 features:

Description Petr Baudis 2005-09-11 14:07:37 UTC
/dev/dri/card* should be created owned by the group "video" by default, so that
it is actually useful for the regular users - those in the "video" group are
considered to be the ones who should have access to the graphic card hardware.
That means something like

 Section "DRI"
     Group "video"
     Mode 0660
 EndSection

in the default xorg.conf.

I originally filed this in Gentoo Bugzilla (see the URL field), but they told me
this belongs upstream (although I'm not sure about how much is the "video" group
standarized).

(Note that I'm not sure whether this belongs to the xorg or DRI product.)
Comment 1 Eric Anholt 2005-09-12 22:16:24 UTC
Group "video" is very much not a standard.  However, a patch to make some group
optionally the default during the server build would be quite appropriate, I think.
Comment 2 Alan Coopersmith 2005-09-13 07:48:27 UTC
Making it settable via a build time define would be great too, so that gentoo
could pass -DDEFAULT_DRI_GROUP="video" and other platforms/distros could pass
the correct name for their /etc/group file.   (Or in the modular tree, they'd
pass a --with-default-dri-group="video" flag to configure and it would set the
#define up.)
Comment 3 Daniel Stone 2007-02-27 01:27:57 UTC
Sorry about the phenomenal bug spam, guys.  Adding xorg-team@ to the QA contact so bugs don't get lost in future.
Comment 4 Jeremy Huddleston Sequoia 2011-09-26 14:47:30 UTC
Do we actually want this?  I'm not sure what benefit we gain from it.
Comment 5 Daniel Stone 2011-09-26 14:51:02 UTC
It certainly made some amount of sense at the time, though as noted, it wasn't at all standard between distros.  On Linux now we at least have udev to handle the device node creation for us, and BSDs seem to a) be a bit less picky about out-of-the-box stuff like this, and b) not really have DRI anyway, so I think we could probably just close this one.

Use of freedesktop.org services, including Bugzilla, is subject to our Code of Conduct. How we collect and use information is described in our Privacy Policy.