NEWS.md

Release notes for xrdp v0.10.0 (2024/05/10)

This section notes changes since the v0.10 branch was created.

General announcements

The biggest news of this release is that Graphic Pipeline Extension also called GFX in short has been supported. xrdp v0.10 with GFX achieves more frame rates and less bandwidth compared to v0.9. There is a significant performance improvement especially if the client is Windows 11's mstsc.exe or Microsoft Remote Desktop for Mac. GFX H.264/AVC 444 mode and hardware-accelerated encoding are not supported in this version yet.

GFX implementation in xrdp is sponsored by an enterprise sponsor. @CyberTrust is also one of the sponsors. We very much appreciate the sponsorship. It helped us to accelerate xrdp development and land GFX earlier!

Please consider sponsoring or making a donation to the project if you like xrdp. We accept financial contributions via Open Collective. Direct donations to each developer via GitHub Sponsors are also welcomed.

Highlights

This section describes the most user-visible new or changed features in xrdp since v0.9.19. See Branch v0.10 for all changes relative to v0.9.19.

• Added GFX support with multi-monitor support (including monitor hot plug/unplug) (#2256 #2338 #2595 #2879 #2891 #2911 #2929 #2933)
• Touchpad inertial scrolling (#2364, #2424). Thanks to new contributor @seflerZ
• New look of login screen (#2366)
• Scaled login screen on higher DPI monitors (#2341, #2427, #2435)
  • This feature works automatically when monitor DPI information is sent by the client (i.e. a full-screen session)
  • Native platform tools are now provided to manipulate .fv1 format font files.
• The format of the date and time in the log file has been changed to ISO 8601 with milliseconds (#2386 #2541)
• xrdp-sesman now supports a --reload switch to allow for the configuration to be changed when sessions are active (#2416)

Security fixes

None

New features

• If the client announces support for the Image RemoteFX codec it is logged (back-port of #2946)

Bug fixes

• Fix some monitor hotplug issues (#2951)
• GFX: Fix disconnect on resize of busy windows (#2962 #2957)
• Fall back to IPv4 if IPv6 capable but don't have an IPv6 address set (#2967 #2957)
• Remove tcutils channel from xrdp.ini (#2970 #2957)
• Don't generate a corefile when generating SIGSEGV during unit testing (#2987)
• If the drdynvc static channel isn't available, disable GFX gracefully (#3003)
• A buffer misconfiguration which affects performance on high bandwidth, high latency links has been addressed (cherry-pick of #2910)
• A permissions fix for the socketdir update in #2731 has been issued (cherry-pick of #3011)

Internal changes

• Adjust log level not too verbose (#2954 #2972 #2957)
• Migrate GitHub actions to Node 20 (#2955 #2957)
• Bump copyright year and make easier to bump (#2956 #2957)
• Remove duplicate DEBUG output (#2976 #2977)
• Add script to make release tarball (#2983)
• Syscall filter for xrdp updated (cherry-pick of #3017)
• GFX memory usage for large screens is greatly improved (cherry-pick of #3013)
• librfxcodec SSE2 performance improvements (#3032)

Known issues

• On-the-fly resolution change with the Microsoft Store version of Remote Desktop client sometimes crashes on connect (#1869)
• xrdp's login dialog is not relocated at the center of the new resolution after on-the-fly resolution change happens (#1867)

Changes for users

• If moving from v0.9.x, read the 'User changes' for the v0.10 branch below.

Changes for packagers or developers

• If moving from v0.9.x, read the 'User changes' and 'Significant changes for packagers or developers section' sections for the v0.10 branch below.

---

Branch v0.10

This branch was forked from development on 2024-02-08 in preparation for testing and release of v0.10.1.

The changes in this section are relative to version v0.9.19 of xrdp.

User changes

• The x11rdp X server is no longer supported. Users will need to move to xorgxrdp (#2489)

• Running xrdp and xrdp-sesman on separate hosts is no longer supported.

• There are some changes to xrdp.ini and sesman.ini which break backwards compatibility. In particular:-

  • sesman.ini/Globals/ListenAddress is not longer used. A warning message is generated if this is found in the configuration, but the configuration will continue to work.
  • sesman.ini/Globals/ListenPort is now a path to a socket, or an unqualified socket in a default directory. If the old default value 3350 is found, a warning is generated and a default value is used instead. The configuration will continue to work.
  • The ip and pamsessionmng parameters are no longer required in sections in xrdp.ini to locate the sesman port. Unnecessary usages of this parameter now generate warnings. The configuration will continue to work.
  • The 'C' field for the session allocation policy has been replaced with Policy=Separate. This field is has a very specific specialist purpose, and will not be used by the vast majority of users. The renaming makes it much clearer what is happening (#2251 #2239). Any uses of the 'C' field will generate warnings, and the configuration will require updating

• The format of the date and time in the log file has been changed to ISO 8601 with milliseconds (#2386 #2541)

  Users are urged to heed any generated configuration warnings and update their configurations. Later major versions of xrdp may remove these warnings, or introduce other behaviours for the affected parameters.

Security fixes

This branch provides following important security fixes reported by Team BT5 (BoB 11th). We appreciate their great help with making and reviewing patches for them.

• CVE-2022-23468
• CVE-2022-23477
• CVE-2022-23478
• CVE-2022-23479
• CVE-2022-23480
• CVE-2022-23481
• CVE-2022-23483
• CVE-2022-23482
• CVE-2022-23484
• CVE-2022-23493

The following issue was reported by @gafusss

• CVE-2023-40184

Other security fixes:-

• CVE-2023-42822: Unchecked access to font glyph info

New features

• Added GFX support with multi-monitor support (including monitor hot plug/unplug) (#2256 #2338 #2595 #2879 #2891 #2911 #2929 #2933)
• Add Ulalaca that enables remote access to macOS's native screen (developed by team unstablers)
  • Ulalaca is still heavy in development, not suitable for production use yet
  • sessionbroker and sessionprojector are also required, see also README
• Scaled login screen on higher DPI monitors (#2341, #2427, #2435)
  • This feature works automatically when monitor DPI information is sent by the client (i.e. a full-screen session)
  • Native platform tools are now provided to manipulate .fv1 format font files.
• Touchpad inertial scrolling (#2364, #2424). Thanks to new contributor @seflerZ
• New look of login screen (#2366)
• Record codec GUID to identify unknown codc (#2401)
• OpenSuSE Tumbleweed move to /usr/lib/pam.d is now supported in the installation scripts (#2413)
• xrdp-sesman now supports a --reload switch to allow for the configuration to be changed when sessions are active (#2416)
• VNC backend session now supports extra mouse buttons 6, 7 and 8 (#2426)
• LogFile=<stdout> redirects log to stdout, which is useful for debugging (#2407)
• xrdp-sesrun and xrdp-sesadmin can now authenticate automatically as the logged-in user without a password (#2472)
• Empty passwords are no longer automatically passed though to sesman for authentication (#2487)
• BSD setusercontext() is now supported (#2225, #2473)
• The FUSE mount path can now be qualified with the display name or display string (#2528)
• Debian: use startup command from /usr/share/xsession if DISPLAY_SESSION is set (#2522)
• The directory where PAM configuration files is installed can now be set with --with-pamconfdir (#2552 #2557)
• Some classes of 'blue screen' failures have been addressed:-
  • X server failures are now reported as a separate error from window manager (#2592)
  • sesman failures are reported immediately (#2640)
• Allow longer UserWindowManager strings (#2651)
• Some changes have been made to made it easier to implement AppArmor support in the future (#2265):-
  • g_file_open() has been replaced with g_file_open_ro() and g_file_open_rw() calls
  • the starting of the X server with no-new-privileges can now be disabled by the administrator
• On systemd-based systems, system call filtering is used to restrict the system calls that the xrdp process can make (#2697 #2719)
• GNOME and KDE keyrings should now be supported out-of-the-box on Debian and Arch (#2776)
• Implement vsock support for FreeBSD #2798
• Side buttons on some mice are now supported by NeutrinoRDP (#2864). Thanks to new contributor @naruhito for this patch.
• Support for the Elbrus E2K architecture (#2872). Thanks to new contributor @r-a-sattarov for this patch.
• Just log Image RemoteFX codec (#2946)

Bug fixes

• A missing directive to link libxrdpapi with libcommon has been added (#2185)
• Some sesman config warning messages could be lost. This has now been fixed (#2198)
• Moving sesman to a Unix domain socket fixes a number of issues related to firewalls and Ipv4/v6 connectivity issues (#1596 #1805 #1855)
• Secondary groups are now added correctly on Linux from /etc/security/group.conf (#1978).
• The --disable-static switch for configure now works (#1467 #2257)
• Windows RDS compatibility has been improved, so some old clients (e.g. Wyse Sx0) can now be used again with xrdp in non-TLS mode (#2166)
• PAM_RHOST is now set for the PAM stack (#2251, #392)
• A minor spacing issue in a sesman log message has been fixed (#2282)
• MSTSC crashes when resolution is changed by maximizing on a different monitor (#2291 #2300)
• Fix swapped require_credentials/enable_token_login config options in xrdp.ini manpage (#2391)
• Passwords are no longer left on the heap in sesman (#1599 #2438)
• Set permissions on pcsc socket dir to owner only (#2454 #2459)
• The Kerberos authentication module has been reworked and tested (#2453)
• Minor documentation fixes (#2481 #2581)
• The correct message is now generated when the session limit is reached (#642)
• sesman now returns better information to xrdp when session creation fails (#909, #1921)
• MaxLoginRetry limit for sesman now works (#1739)
• On systems where the same user can have multiple names, the correct session is now reconnected (#1823)
• On FreeBSD, the correct peer is now logged for xorgxrdp connections (#146)
• In some situations, xrdp sessions can be bootstrapped on system startup (#1303)
• Don't try to listen on the scard socket if it isn't there (#2504)
• Fix some noise of MP3/AAC audio redirection and add some parameters to tweak sounds (#2519 #2608)
• Memory management fixes to list module (#2536 #2575)
• Session is not now started until X server is fully active (#2492)
• Fix potential NULL dereferences in chansrv (#2573)
• An erroneous free in the smartcard handling code has been removed (#2607)
• An unnecessary 'check.h' include was removed which prevented compilation on Arch systems (#2649)
• No user session created with xrdp and pam_systemd_home account module (#1684)
• Homedir gets not correctly created at first login (#350)
• pam_setcred never returns xrdp-sesman is hung (#1323)
• chansrv should no longer hang occasionally in developer builds on session exit (#2145)
• Environment variables set by PAM modules are no longer restricted to around 250 characters (#2711)
• Checking group membership should now work better on systems using directory services (#2806 #2815)
• Pasting more than 32K characters of text to the clipboard now succeeds (#1839 #2810)
• An incompatibility with FreeRDP 2.11.2 in the drive redirector has been fixed (#2834 #2838)
• Unicode bugs have been fixed (#942 #2603)

Internal changes

• SCP (Sesman Control Protocol) has been refactored from separate V0 and V1 protocols to a simplified V2 protocol running on top of a new library 'libipm' (#2163).
• libipm provides a way to pass file descriptors between processes (#2494)
• SCP connections are now only supported on top of Unix Domain Sockets (#2207 #2235 #2247)
• Monitor processing logic, which was in two places, has now been unified (#1895 #2301)
• Simplifications to transport connect logic (#2204)
• The fields in struct trans and struct xrdp_client_info used for storing client addressing information have been simplified (#2251)
• A couple of string utility functions have been added to parse character strings like the one used for the session allocation policy (#2251)
• cppcheck version used for CI bumped to 2.13.0 (#2520 #2737 #2785 #2886). Note that #2785 greatly increases cppcheck scan times.
• cppcheck install script no longer installs z3 for cppcheck >= 2.8 (#2782)
• The physical desktop size information sent from the client is now recorded in more situations (#2310)
• Simple maintenance improvements (#2354)
• An opaque type is now used for the auth_info handle used by the sesman auth module (#2362)
• CI updates to cope with github upgrades (#2394)
• GUIDs created for new sessions are now compliant with RFC4122 random UUIDs (#2420)
• Some 'magic numbers' have been replaced with constants (#2421)
• FreeBSD CI now runs a 'make check' (#2490)
• FreeBSD CI now runs on FreeBSD 13.2 (#2621 #2896)
• Some logging improvements on audio redirection (#2537)
• Extra executables : waitforx (#2492 #2591 #2586) xrdp-sesexec (#2644)
• The poll() system call now replaces select() for monitoring file descriptors (#2497 #2568)
• sigaction() now replaces signal() for increased portability (#2813)
• Other portability changes (#2909)
• Some extra convenience functions were added for handling lists of strings (#2576)
• g_malloc, g_free, g_memset, g_memcpy, and g_memmove are now macros. These should not be used in new code (#2609)
• config_ac.h is now used consistently (#2667)
• as mentioned above, g_file_open() has been replaced with g_file_open_ro() and g_file_open_rw() calls
• The separate fifo packages in the common directory and chansrv have now been merged (#2686)
• Unicode conversions are now provided by explicit functions rather than relying on C library mbstowcs()/wcstombs() functions (#2794)
• Some test timeouts have been increased for slow CI machines (#2901)
• g_obj_wait() can now take a zero timeout (#2904)
• POSIX shared memory is now used to communicate with xorgxrdp rather than System-V shared memory (#2709 #2786 #2889)

Significant changes for packagers or developers

• The libscp.so shared library is replaced with libipm.so
• A new shared library libsesman.so contains shared code for sesman and related executables (#2601)
• The default setting for --with-socketdir is now /var/run/xrdp rather than /tmp/.xrdp. The new setting works for installations where /tmp is polyinstantiated ( see #1482 for more details)
• The permissions of the socketdir have changed from 1777 to 755 (owned by root). Within this directory are the sesman socket and user-specific directories. The user-specific directories store the session sockets used by each user (#2731).
  It is recommended not to use the same --with-socketdir setting for v0.9.x and v0.10.x packages as the differing permissions can cause problems on package downgrades. See #3066 for an example of where this can be a problem.
• Passing --disable-static to configure prevents unused static libraries being installed by make install.
• The simple.c example xrdpapi program has been updated to work with logging changes, and is now built as part of the CI (#2276)
• If the xrdp-mkfv1 utility is to be built, the switch --with-freetype2 must be passed to ./configure.
• Minimum supported autoconf version is now 2.69 (#2408)
• Add xrdp-sesman.system to distributed files (#2466 #2467)
• A developer-only utility to exercise the auth module selected at configure time has been provided (#2453)
• Extra executables have been added to this release in pkglibexecdir
• The default systemd unit files have been changed to no longer fork (#2672)