[ardour-users] FIFO and running as root.

[Jan Depner]

On Sat, 2006-04-22 at 14:07 +1000, chris simpson wrote:
> My current setup is an Athlon 2100+ XP, 1GB 2700DDR ram, delta 44,
> running fc5, 2.6.15 vanilla kernel with RT patch and jack using ramfs.
> After hacking for a number of weeks, ardour is now kicking the pants
> off anything I could achieve in the windows realm with the same
> equipment.
>  
> My problem though (not that it has posed a great problem yet), is I
> have to run all these applications as root. Basically, jack (or
> qjackctl) can't setup FIFO stacks (on ramfs) as a non-root user. This
> affects any jack clients as well, because unless they're also root,
> they can't connect to jack. Is there a great danger in running audio
> applications as root, and if so, how can you allow FIFO stacks to be
> setup by a non-root user?
>  

    I'll probably get shouted down for saying this but I run my audio
apps as root and see no major problem with doing that.  I log in to
whatever window manager I want as a normal user but I have a number of
icons set up to run the audio applications as root.  This means that I
have to type in the password for each app but they're usually up for the
duration so it's no big deal.  If I'm running a recording session with a
full band I'll log in as root to fluxbox but I have a script that shuts
down all extraneous applications (including the network, actually my
qjackctl startup script checks to see if I'm running the WM as root and
shuts down the network).

    It seems to me that there is a lot of angst about running
applications as root.  As long as you aren't surfing the web or running
applications that you don't trust you should be OK.  Of course, if you
want to allow multiple users to run JACK, etc, then you have to worry
about how to allow that but if you're the only user on your system, like
me, you shouldn't have to worry about it.


-- 
Jan 'Evil Twin' Depner
The Fuzzy Dice
http://myweb.cableone.net/eviltwin69/fuzzy.html


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