*BSD News Article 14733


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From: cgd@gaia.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Chris G. Demetriou)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.bugs
Subject: Re: Patch for hanging console
Date: 19 Apr 93 21:16:28
Organization: Kernel Hackers 'r' Us
Lines: 37
Message-ID: <CGD.93Apr19211628@gaia.CS.Berkeley.EDU>
References: <1qttvcINNno2@fstgds01.tu-graz.ac.at> <1993Apr19.224208.27016@cs.few.eur.nl>
NNTP-Posting-Host: gaia.cs.berkeley.edu
In-reply-to: pk@cs.few.eur.nl's message of Mon, 19 Apr 1993 22:42:08 GMT

In article <1993Apr19.224208.27016@cs.few.eur.nl> pk@cs.few.eur.nl (Paul Kranenburg) writes:
>The terminal-, keyboard translation- and framebuffer-functions of the
>current pccons driver must be decoupled, providing separate interfaces
>for each (say, /dev/kbd, /dev/fb, etc).

i'm not entirely sure about this...

from my perspective, there's also the problem of:

/dev/console is supposed to be a switch only.  which means
that if i want to put a getty on the real device,
i should be able to.

a great example of a reason to do this is the following fact:
it's quite possible to alternately use a serial port
or the PC console as the actual console, e.g. depending
on whether or not you're using a debugging kernel or not.

for a while, i was doing this all of the time.

for this case, in inittab, you want a getty on /dev/vga
and /dev/com0, or whatever, but you *don't* want one
on /dev/console...


/dev/console should basically be used *only* for things
like syslog, in my opinion, although as things
were shipped in 0.1, it was used for a getty.



cgd
--
Chris G. Demetriou                                    cgd@cs.berkeley.edu

   "386bsd as depth first search: whenever you go to fix something you
       find that 3 more things are actually broken." -- Adam Glass