Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/multi-seat.html

There’s one feature In the upcoming Fedora 17 release that is
immensly useful but very little known, since its feature page
‘ckremoval’ does not explicitly refer to it in its name: true
automatic multi-seat support for Linux.

A multi-seat computer is a system that offers not only one local
seat for a user, but multiple, at the same time. A seat refers to a
combination of a screen, a set of input devices (such as mice and
keyboards), and maybe an audio card or webcam, as individual local
workplace for a user. A multi-seat computer can drive an entire class
room of seats with only a fraction of the cost in hardware, energy,
administration and space: you only have one PC, which usually has way
enough CPU power to drive 10 or more workplaces. (In fact, even a
Netbook has fast enough to drive a couple of seats!) Automatic
multi-seat refers to an entirely automatically managed seat setup:
whenever a new seat is plugged in a new login screen immediately
appears — without any manual configuration –, and when the seat is
unplugged all user sessions on it are removed without delay.

In Fedora 17 we added this functionality to the low-level user and
device tracking of systemd, replacing the previous ConsoleKit logic
that lacked support for automatic multi-seat. With all the ground work
done in systemd, udev and the other components of our plumbing layer
the last remaining bits were surprisingly easy to add.

Currently, the automatic multi-seat logic works best with the USB
multi-seat hardware from Plugable
you can buy cheaply on Amazon
(US). These devices require exactly zero configuration with the
new scheme implemented in Fedora 17: just plug them in at any time,
login screens pop up on them, and you have your additional
seats. Alternatively you can also assemble your seat manually with a
few easy loginctl
attach commands, from any kind of hardware you might have lying
around. To get a full seat you need multiple graphics cards, keyboards
and mice: one set for each seat. (Later on we’ll probably have a graphical
setup utility for additional seats, but that’s not a pressing issue we
believe, as the plug-n-play multi-seat support with the Plugable
devices is so awesomely nice.)

Plugable provided us for free with hardware for testing
multi-seat. They are also involved with the upstream development of
the USB DisplayLink driver for Linux. Due to their positive
involvement with Linux we can only recommend to buy their
hardware. They are good guys, and support Free Software the way all
hardware vendors should! (And besides that, their hardware is also
nicely put together. For example, in contrast to most similar vendors
they actually assign proper vendor/product IDs to their USB hardware
so that we can easily recognize their hardware when plugged in to set
up automatic seats.)

Currently, all this magic is only implemented in the GNOME stack
with the biggest component getting updated being the GNOME Display
Manager. On the Plugable USB hardware you get a full GNOME Shell
session with all the usual graphical gimmicks, the same way as on any
other hardware. (Yes, GNOME 3 works perfectly fine on simpler graphics
cards such as these USB devices!) If you are hacking on a different
desktop environment, or on a different display manager, please have a
look at the
multi-seat documentation we put together, and particularly at
our short piece about writing
display managers which are multi-seat capable.

If you work on a major desktop environment or display manager and
would like to implement multi-seat support for it, but lack the
aforementioned Plugable hardware, we might be able to provide you with
the hardware for free. Please contact us directly, and we might be
able to send you a device. Note that we don’t have unlimited devices
available, hence we’ll probably not be able to pass hardware to
everybody who asks, and we will pass the hardware preferably to people
who work on well-known software or otherwise have contributed good
code to the community already. Anyway, if in doubt, ping us, and
explain to us why you should get the hardware, and we’ll consider you!
(Oh, and this not only applies to display managers, if you hack on some other
software where multi-seat awareness would be truly useful, then don’t
hesitate and ping us!)

Phoronix has this
story about this new multi-seat support which is quite interesting and
full of pictures. Please have a look.

Plugable started a Pledge
drive to lower the price of the Plugable USB multi-seat terminals
further. It’s full of pictures (and a video showing all this in action!), and uses the code we now make
available in Fedora 17 as base. Please consider pledging a few
bucks.

Recently David Zeuthen added
multi-seat support to udisks as well. With this in place, a user
logged in on a specific seat can only see the USB storage plugged into
his individual seat, but does not see any USB storage plugged into any
other local seat. With this in place we closed the last missing bit of
multi-seat support in our desktop stack.

With this code in Fedora 17 we cover the big use cases of
multi-seat already: internet cafes, class rooms and similar
installations can provide PC workplaces cheaply and easily without any
manual configuration. Later on we want to build on this and make this
useful for different uses too: for example, the ability to get a login
screen as easily as plugging in a USB connector makes this not useful
only for saving money in setups for many people, but also in embedded
environments (consider monitoring/debugging screens made available via
this hotplug logic) or servers (get trivially quick local access to
your otherwise head-less server). To be truly useful in these areas we
need one more thing though: the ability to run a simply getty
(i.e. text login) on the seat, without necessarily involving a
graphical UI.

The well-known X successor Wayland already comes out of the box with multi-seat
support based on this logic.

Oh, and BTW, as Ubuntu appears to be “focussing” on “clarity” in the
“cloud” now ;-), and chose Upstart instead of systemd, this feature
won’t be available in Ubuntu any time soon. That’s (one detail of) the
price Ubuntu has to pay for choosing to maintain it’s own (largely
legacy, such as ConsoleKit) plumbing stack.

Multi-seat has a long history on Unix. Since the earliest days Unix
systems could be accessed by multiple local terminals at the same
time. Since then local terminal support (and hence multi-seat)
gradually moved out of view in computing. The fewest machines these
days have more than one seat, the concept of terminals survived almost
exclusively in the context of PTYs (i.e. fully virtualized API
objects, disconnected from any real hardware seat) and VCs (i.e. a
single virtualized local seat), but almost not in any other way (well,
server setups still use serial terminals for emergency remote access,
but they almost never have more than one serial terminal). All what we
do in systemd is based on the ideas originally brought forward in
Unix; with systemd we now try to bring back a number of the good ideas
of Unix that since the old times were lost on the roadside. For
example, in true Unix style we already started to expose the concept
of a service in the file system (in
/sys/fs/cgroup/systemd/system/), something where on Linux the
(often misunderstood) “everything is a file” mantra previously
fell short. With automatic multi-seat support we bring back support
for terminals, but updated with all the features of today’s desktops:
plug and play, zero configuration, full graphics, and not limited to
input devices and screens, but extending to all kinds of devices, such
as audio, webcams or USB memory sticks.

Anyway, this is all for now; I’d like to thank everybody who was
involved with making multi-seat work so nicely and natively on the
Linux platform. You know who you are! Thanks a ton!