running s6-rc as unpriviledged user

From: Terrel Shumway <terrel_at_gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 27 Feb 2016 16:25:29 -0700

I am fiddling with s6 to see if I can use it to manage login sessions.

first cut works, but is crufty

sv/wm/run execs dwm
sv/xterm/run execs x-terminal-emulator (running xterm supervised is fun)
sv/xserver/run execs the X server (Xephyr for testing)
sv/ssh-agent/run execs ssh-agent in non-daemon mode


The cruft is that wm and xterm die if xserver is not already running. This
is not a big problem, because they are small and just retry in a few seconds

However, I thought it would be cool to use the dependency stuff of s6-rc
 to say that wm and xterm depend on xserver.
I could also have xserver write its DISPLAY to a well-known place for the
clients to pick up instead of hard-coding it.
I could use oneshots to do the stuff that normally happens in .xintrc
before exec wm, e.g. ssh-add
wm/finish could down xserver
xserver/finish could down the whole supervision tree.

The first thing that happened when I tried to run s6-rc-init was a core
dump on strlen. Is this a symptom of not running as root?
How do I debug this?

*Why* does s6-rc-init need to run as root?
Received on Sat Feb 27 2016 - 23:25:29 UTC