Bug 489876 – x11-base/xorg-server Init script for Xvfb, the virtual framebuffer X server

• Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
• Product: Gentoo Linux

[Description Christian Affolter 2013-10-30 13:58:13 UTC]

x11-base/xorg-server installs the Xvfb server (virtual framebuffer X server for X Version 11) if the xvfb use flag was enabled.

Attached is a new init script and its configuration file for starting the Xvfb server. It would be nice, if this could be incorporated into the x11-base/xorg-server ebuild, with the corresponding system user (here xvfb).
Also note, that the user or the ebuild needs to create an authorization file, for example: 'echo "localhost" > /etc/X11/Xvfb.0.auth' according to http://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.6/doc/man/man7/Xsecurity.7.xhtml

Reproducible: Always

[Comment 1 Christian Affolter 2013-10-30 13:59:31 UTC]

Created attachment 362298 [details]
/etc/init.d/xvfb

[Comment 2 Christian Affolter 2013-10-30 14:00:03 UTC]

Created attachment 362300 [details]
/etc/conf.d/xvfb

[Comment 3 Piotr Karbowski (RETIRED) 2021-02-13 20:22:32 UTC]

I am not very keen to include something like that into the tree. Usually you want to have Xvfb purpose driven, like separated Xvfb for each CI run, for selenium and such, meaning system-wide started Xvfb is not really that useful. There's little value in adding it, and it also do not support systemd which narrows potential uses even more. While I appreciate your contribution, we will not add it into the tree.

[Comment 4 Christian Affolter 2021-07-02 08:01:39 UTC]

Dear Pioter,

nice to get some feedback after 8 years ;-)

(In reply to Piotr Karbowski from comment #3)
> I am not very keen to include something like that into the tree. Usually you
> want to have Xvfb purpose driven, like separated Xvfb for each CI run, for
> selenium and such, meaning system-wide started Xvfb is not really that
> useful. There's little value in adding it, and it also do not support
> systemd which narrows potential uses even more. While I appreciate your
> contribution, we will not add it into the tree.

I certainly respect your decision to reject the contribution. However, complaining about missing systemd support for a contribution from 2013 is a bit unfair. And just for the record, there was a valid use case at that time, I used to run Xvfb within vservers (pre-containers) for software requiring an X11 server or to provide X11 applications to users without a full-blown VM. For both cases Xvfb was run system-wide.

Best regards,
Christian