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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday February 10 2018, @08:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the maybe-Y-will-be-better dept.

Chris Siebenmann over on his personal web page at the University of Toronto writes about X networking. He points out two main shortcomings preventing realization of the original vision of network transparancy. One is network speed and latency. The other is a too narrow scope for X's communication facilities.

X's network transparency was not designed as 'it will run xterm well'; originally it was to be something that should let you run almost everything remotely, providing a full environment. Even apart from the practical issues covered in Daniel Stone's slide presentation [warning for PDF], it's clear that it's been years since X could deliver a real first class environment over the network. You cannot operate with X over the network in the same way that you do locally. Trying to do so is painful and involves many things that either don't work at all or perform so badly that you don't want to use them.

Remote display protocols remain useful, but it's time to admit another way will have to be found. What's the latest word on Wayland or Mir?

Source : X's network transparency has wound up mostly being a failure


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by TheRaven on Saturday February 10 2018, @06:12PM (2 children)

    by TheRaven (270) on Saturday February 10 2018, @06:12PM (#636080) Journal

    Right, because that's a much lower attack surface than X already has, where any code that runs as the current user can intercept all events and can run any arbitrary code on the GPU and can snoop on the contents of all existing windows.

    You basically have two choices: run code on the display server, or accept that remote display is going to suck on any network with nontrivial latency.

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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @06:36PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @06:36PM (#636092)

    https://www.x.org/wiki/Development/Documentation/Security/ [x.org]
    And never assume that if you do not know about something, no one else does.

    • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Sunday February 11 2018, @10:40AM

      by TheRaven (270) on Sunday February 11 2018, @10:40AM (#636326) Journal
      Nothing in that link contradicts what I said. The authentication mechanisms (including Kerberos) let any process that can read files owned by the user connect. The SECURITY extension has so many caveats that it's effectively nonexistent. Anything that is allowed to use the GLX extension can still run code on your GPU which can snoop on the contents of all other windows.
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