Quoting Brett Lymn,

> >>It shouldn't need to be:
> >>
> >>basalt (thorpej) ~ 133% ll /usr/X11R5/bin/XhpBSD 
> >>-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  1296991 Oct 19  1994 /usr/X11R5/bin/XhpBSD*
> >>
> >
> >DOH!! I got it confused with xterm I think - time for more coffee I think.
> >

> Actually, I have just check in my i386 machine and the X server is
> setuid there.

On the i386 (or at least: all i386 OSs that run XFree that I know of)
the X server has to be suid root, because it needs to do various sundry
things like accessing the I/O ports directly and possibly mmapping
/dev/mem to get direct linear framebuffer access.

On other ports, there is a framebuffer device, which makes life easier (*)

- Frank

(*) Ideally, you'd have an fb device on the i386 as well, but that would
    be either one huge device driver, or having to pick from too many
    smaller ones, given the large variety of video hardware out there.