So according to my previous post, I’ve been trying to come up with a ITC based system for launching the program that the key daemon has to run. The major problem that I’ve been facing is that the programs that were being launched from the de-escalated child process were not able to read the environment variables that were set in the user space. This is because when a child process is created, it inherits the environment variables of the parent, hence in this case, the child process inherits the environment variables of the root process. Hence, I got around this by passing the env to the child upon creation.
let cmd = Command::new("HOME=/home/username firefox").spawn().unwrap();
This way, the child process is able to read the environment variables that are passed to it.
so, this week I was trying to address the standardization of the environment variables that are
passed to the child process.
Turns out that this happens automatically when the command is run from the shell.
I initially thought of changing the /proc/self/environ file to the environment variables that are
passed to the child process. However, it is a virtual file and cannot be changed.
More, I found quite a major bug in this approach, where programs that are launched from the thread, using the env syntax above, they seem to fail to run sudo, essentially losing their user identity. I am sure I can get around this by changing the right env settings as I pass in, but I am still researching it. It does seem to be a priority issue
To solve this, I am working on generating a diff tree of the /proc/self between a normal process and
a process that is run from our child thread.
Also, I am working on making sure that there are no leaks in our IPC approach to get the env.