Back to Basics With X and systemd

25 Aug 2012

2012/11/02 Update: Arch Linux now provides this by default. /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc will start your X session on XDG_VTNR, if the environment variable is set. Therefore, if you’re using Arch, stop reading here and update to at least xorg-xinit 1.3.2-3.

This is for everyone who says that systemd doesn’t work well with startx as far as maintaining an authenticated session. There’s no “ck-session-launch” equivalent, sure, but it isn’t needed. When you login on at a getty, you already have an authenticated session. However, if you run startx without parameters, you’ll find that a new terminal is allocated – one where you aren’t authenticated. According to upstream, it’s just a matter of convincing xinit (the underlying mechanism in startx) to not allocate a new TTY. How do we do that? By merely passing the VT we’re current on to xinit.


xinit -- vt01

And this just works – you’ll keep your authenticated session, and X is started up according to the contents of $HOME/.xinitrc.

…But I’m lazy. What if I’m on tty2? Passing vt01 is going to break this – we should pass vt02 in this case. Add some shell voodoo:

#!/bin/bash

TTY=${TTY:-$(tty)}
TTY=${TTY#/dev/}

if [[ $TTY != tty* ]]; then
  printf '==> ERROR: invalid TTY\n' >&2
  exit 1
fi

printf -v vt 'vt%02d' "${TTY#tty}"

xinit -- "$vt" "$@"

Now it’s even easier. All we have to run is our little helper script.

…But that’s not quite enough. startx itself is a wrapper around xinit and performs some modicum of useful setup. So how can convince startx to do this for us?

xinit is a really stupid program. It’s a glorified compiled shell script with some extra signal handling. It launches 2 programs – a server (generally X), and a client (or many clients, as described by your .xinitrc). Just as .xinitrc exists to describe the client side setup, there’s another file, .xserverrc, which a user can drop in $HOME to describe the server startup behavior. You’ll find the default file in /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc. It’s a one liner which just runs /usr/bin/X with a couple of flags. You can probably already guess where this is going. Add $HOME/.xserverrc as the following:

#!/bin/bash

TTY=${TTY:-$(tty)}
TTY=${TTY#/dev/}

if [[ $TTY != tty* ]]; then
  printf '==> ERROR: invalid TTY\n' >&2
  exit 1
fi

printf -v vt 'vt%02d' "${TTY#tty}"

exec /usr/bin/X -nolisten tcp "$vt" "$@"

Now when you run startx, it’ll start the server on the appropriate VT to keep your authenticated session, and .xinitrc continues to describe your client side behavior.