What are the accepted values for capabilities?

Support
1

Hello all,
I have some led stripes attached to my motherboard and they can be controlled by openrgb. However, it only works when starting it as a root, which I would like to avoid. As a possible solution accoring to openrgb is to give it additional capabilities by running sudo setcap cap_sys_rawio=ep ./openrgb
So the question is what does ep as a value of setcap cap_sys_rawio stand for?

After reading the man pages of man setcap and man capabilities (see here), I assume that it sets the capabilities to “Effective” and “Permitted”. However, I could not find any source that explains details about the available values and what they mean.

Does anyone have good source to read up on that topic?

2

According to my zsh autocompletion:

e  -- effective
i  -- inheritable
p  -- permitted
3

A good source is the man page:

man capabilities

There ar a lot of them… read all of them: linux capabilities at DuckDuckGo

4

man capabilities is an interesting read and so is man setcap.
However, they fail to define what values setcap utilizes.
An an example one can use setcap cap_sys_rawio=ep but what the value ep actually means is not in there as those abbreviations don’t seem to be defined in there. As mentioned before, I assume that it is “effective” and “permitted” but that is just a guess

5

I was not aware that zsh can autocomplete in that context.
That will suffice to confirm my earlier guess.
Thank you all

6

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