Re: [ros-kernel] Re: ROS gui

[Koert v. d. V. <ko...@ic...>]

> do you mean switch user?  note that this user is still logged on.
> OTOH, a program that wil run for several users (sharing memory &&
recources)
> wil be cool. Think of cmd.exe, windows commander, ICQ and what ever. I
would
> like to share this programs betwen logged users.

A potential pittfall for such a structure is user permissions. Consider an
admin and a simple user sharing notepad (ridiculous, I know...) What happens
if the admin tries to open a severly protected file, such as kernel32.dll,
and what happens when the user tries to open it? The program would have to
behave differently for each of these situations, so either the uid an gid of
the proces should be changed, or the program should handle this itself. In
the latter, part of the code has to run as user 'System' (or, at your
option, root), which imposes severe security risks, as a simple buffer
overflow would enable a local (or perhaps even remote) user to gain all
permissions.

Anyway, I guess that would be a program-design issue, not an os-issue, so
perhaps it is not really relevant to this list.