On Thu, Jul 9, 2026 at 2:45 AM Philipp Zabel via lists.openembedded.org
<[email protected]> wrote:

> On Mi, 2026-07-08 at 17:37 +0300, Leon Anavi wrote:
> > Add pam to DISTRO_FEATURES_DEFAULTS in init-manager-systemd.inc.
> > This way pam will available if variable VIRTUAL-RUNTIME_init_manager
> > has been set to systemd. Otherwise having systemd in conjunction
> > with wayland but without pam leads to a conflict with the
> > REQUIRED_DISTRO_FEATURES for weston related recipes.
>
> I think these requirements are partially incorrect, btw.
>
> Weston itself only requires PAM for the VNC password, so if
> PACKAGECONFIG[vnc] is disabled, there is no PAM dependency from
> weston_15.0.1.bb at all, and if vnc is enabled, the PAM dependency has
> nothing to do with systemd being enabled or used as init system.
>
> The PAM dependency in weston-init.bb comes from the PAMName=weston-
> autologin option in weston.service and the corresponding weston-
> autologin PAM configuration. Those files are always installed if
> DISTRO_FEATURES has systemd, even if VIRTUAL-RUNTIME_init_manager is
> set to something else.
> Shouldn't either the pam distro feature depend on the systemd distro
> feature, or should the weston.service/weston-autologin files be
> installed at all if the systemd distro feature is enabled but
> init_manager is set to something else?
> I think it wouldn't be even better to remove the PAM requirement from
> weston-init if VNC is disabled, as Weston doesn't need the PAM login in
> that case.
>

I believe weston-init needs PAM regardless of VNC being enabled.

The intention of weston-init is to provide a minimal setup to start weston
on boot and not run as root (since that's a huge pain). There are
certainly other ways of starting weston (such as a login manager), but this
one has been around for a while and is nice because it "just works" even on
devices with no keyboard for (e.g. a user login in a login manager), has a
good security model (not running as root), aside from PAM has almost no
dependencies, and is quite simple. IMHO, It works well for an embedded
device because you can set the weston shell to the kiosk shell and
immediately start your application as a client to show your UI, but it's
not really great for a "desktop" experience (but I never found that a
useful experience on an embedded device outside of demonstration purposes).
It's more or less a copy of a similar system I use in my day job and I had
lofty goals of removing our version for the upstream one, but I'm beginning
to think this is an unrealistic goal.

Regardless, if we continue to use weston-init, we probably need PAM by
default - not because of weston, but because of weston-init. Alternatively,
we can do something other than weston-init, but I don't really have any
idea what that should be, what it would take to switch, or how useful it
would be in the real world.



>
> regards
> Philipp
>
> 
>
>
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