moko running everything as root

[Flemming Richter Mikkelsen]

On 6/13/08, Robert Taylor <subscribers at tinsputnik.com> wrote:
> Peter Nijs wrote:
> >> no problems. what i don't want is people to get their hopes up. this was in
> >> the context of people asking if they can play vga video and me going "good
> >> luck!". there is reality - and you can sit and hack away spend lots of time
> >> and get 1 case to work, and work well. as i said - it will depend on codec,
> >> bitrate, quality etc. mpeg4 decode in hw is great - but remember it is also
> >> limiting to just mp4 - all your mpeg1, ogg, etc. videos will not work. also
> >> as long as mplayer is accessing glamo hardware it must run as root.
> >> admittedly we run everything as root - but come the day when we don't...
> >> this is trouble.
> >>
> >>
> Hi.
>
> Can someone clear up for me why everything runs as root?  When I heard
> the iPhone ran everything as root I kinda sneered at it but now I can't
> be so smug.
>
> What are the engineering reasons for this?
The reason is that the user normally wants to run a lot of root applications
such as rdate, power off, opkg, etc. Of course this should be solved, but it
should not be a top priority.