Gnome Display Manager Reference Manual
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# The GDM Daemon

GDM was written with simplicity and security in mind. The overall design concept is this:

Upon startup the `gdm` daemon parses its config file `gdm.conf`. For each of the local displays `gdm` forks an Xserver and a slave process. The main `gdm` process will then listen to XDMCP requests from remote displays and monitor the local display sessions.

The `gdm` slave process opens the display and starts `gdmlogin`, the graphical login program. `gdmlogin` runs as a dedicated user and communicates asynchronously with the slave process through a pipe.

GDM relies heavily on the presence of PAM, Pluggable Authentication Modules, but supports regular crypt() and shadow passwords on legacy systems.

Remote displays can connect to the XDMCP port on the GDM host. `gdm` will grant access to hosts specified in the gdm service section in your TCP Wrappers configuration file. GDM does not support remote display access control on systems without TCP Wrappers. XDMCP support can be turned off completely, however.

GDM includes several measures making it more resistant to denial of service attacks on the XDMCP service. A lot of the protocol parameters, handshaking timeouts etc. can be fine tuned. The defaults should work for most systems, however. Don't change them unless you know what you're doing.

In general GDM is very reluctant regarding reading/writing of user files. For instance it refuses to touch anything but regular files. Links, sockets and devices are ignored. The value of the RelaxPermissions parameter determines whether GDM should accept files writable by the user's group or others. These are ignored by default.

All operations on user files are done with the effective userid of the user. If the sanity check fails on the user's `.Xauthority` file, a fallback cookie is created in `/tmp`.

Finally, the sysadmin can specify the maximum file size GDM should accept, and, if the face browser is enabled, a tunable maximum icon size is also enforced. On large systems it is still advised to turn off the face browser for performance reasons. Looking up icons in homedirs, scaling and rendering face icons can take quite a long time. YMMV.

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