[Vm-dev] Pi vm builds need a priority checker applet

[David T. Lewis]

On Wed, Aug 17, 2016 at 03:17:05PM -0700, tim Rowledge wrote:
> 
> A persistent problem with the PI vm is that users of xrdp need to wrap the start-up in ???sudo -E??? because.. well, never mind, unix is just plain stupid. Whatever the issue, we can test for the problem of needing to use sudo by running a trivial test program in the shell script; all it does is try changing a thread priority and returns whether it worked or not.
> 
> So far as I know this is only an issue on the Pi but then I don???t use an x86 linux machine. I???d imagine any machine with an older kernel might need the check too but others will have to say. If it is of use to general linux machines then it is pretty obvious that we should put the source in platforms/unix/vm and add the build to the general make process. It if is really only a Pi issue then maybe someone has a strong view on having the source/build elsewhere. Any thoughts?
> 
> tim

It would be good if we could figure out the reason that you need to use
sudo when running with xrdp. Running Squeak with root privileges is a
Very Bad Idea, and we certainly should not be encouraging kids to do that.
Hopefully there is a way to convince xrdp to behave properly without the sudo.

Unfortunately I don't have a Pi readily at hand to help right now. Can you
say anything about what error messages or symptoms that you see when you
run under xrdp without the "sudo -E"? Is it related to the privileges for
the heartbeat thread priority?

Dave