Re: setting brightness as privileged operation?

From: Michal Hocko
Date: Fri May 12 2017 - 02:20:11 EST


On Thu 11-05-17 23:07:55, Pavel Machek wrote:
> On Thu 2017-01-05 10:23:07, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > Hi,
> > I have just learned that my Xfce Power Manager cannot manipulate
> > brightness because I do not have policykit installed on my computer.
> > There is a reason for that (yeah it depends on systemd which I prefer
> > not have).
> >
> > While this is clearly a problem of the Xfce applet I am wondering why
> > setting the brightness has to be a privileged operation at all. Is there
> > any strong reason for it or just a general policy that we do not give
> > world writable files into sysfs?
>
> Well, if you have another user logged in using ssh, and changing _your_
> brightness, that will be somehow annoying, right?

I am pretty sure that such a user can do much larger harm than playing
with brigtness of my LCD. Anyway I went with my own rc.local hack.
--
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs