SuperUser permission for the Driver??

[pgf at laptop.org]

benjamin m. schwartz wrote:
 > 
 > Deepak Saxena wrote:
 > | I agree with Paul that we need to have a solution to these
 > | cases iff we want to support running arbitrary software and
 > | hw combinations on the XO. The other option is to limit the
 > | scope of the system to a very specific set of sw and hw,
 > | treating the XO as embedded education appliance instead of
 > | a general-purpose laptop device, which I don't think
 > | we want to do.
 > 
 > That is _precisely_ what I want to do.
 > 
 > OLPC's goal is to distribute XOs to the poorest children in the world.
 > That means that in the category of electronics, the great majority will
 > have the XO and nothing else.  Peripherals are a rarity, an edge case.

perhaps, but i have trouble believing that no school will ever
have any "loaner", or "classroom shared" peripherals that the
students may not own, but will still need to be able to use.

(but perhaps most of these will fall into some well-known categores --
e.g., USB serial adapters.  and we could maybe support them with
a canned udev entry?)

 > 
 > There is a planned design to allow the user to grant extra privileges to
 > different Activities, 

reference?

paul

 > but those privileges will probably never extend to
 > loading arbitrary kernel modules.  I have no problem declaring that anyone
 > who is modifying the kernel is a "developer", and should therefore get a
 > devkey and call modprobe themselves.

=---------------------
 paul fox, pgf at laptop.org