*BSD News Article 17880


Return to BSD News archive

Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!haven.umd.edu!uunet!pipex!uknet!mcsun!hp4at!news.univie.ac.at!fstgds15.tu-graz.ac.at!fstgds01.tu-graz.ac.at!not-for-mail
From: chmr@edvz.tu-graz.ac.at (Christoph Robitschko)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.bugs
Subject: Re: XFree86 1.3 crashes under 386BSD
Followup-To: comp.os.386bsd.bugs
Date: 2 Jul 1993 20:01:58 +0200
Organization: Technical University of Graz, Austria
Lines: 22
Message-ID: <211t6mINNrhb@fstgds01.tu-graz.ac.at>
References: <1993Jul2.120207.3262@gmd.de>
NNTP-Posting-Host: fstgds01.tu-graz.ac.at
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.1 PL7]

In article <1993Jul2.120207.3262@gmd.de> Holger Veit (veit@mururoa.gmd.de) wrote:
> You are running 386bsd with pccons, and the effect was that over night your
> keyboard was killed? This is a known effect, happening with all console drivers
> which abuse /dev/vga as a second entry to /dev/console (i.e. have /dev/vga in
> /etc/ttys). In this case syslogd closes and reopens /dev/console at midnight, and
> thus grabs the keyboard away from the xserver. There are two possible fixes for that,
> one that does counting the open/closes on /dev/console and "/dev/vga" and does the
> actual close when both counters are zero (a slightly different alternative uses
> the reference count for a vnode for this), or give the server an own device for
> raw keyboard access rather than /dev/console. This latter has been done in codrv.
> 

We have talked about this before.
You cannot do #1 (except with vnode reference counts, which is the way the
whole device reference counting is implemented), and #2 does not really
solve the problem (ever tried it with a serial console ?)

To the original poster: A patch using vnode reference counts is available
from ftp.tu-graz.ac.at:.../unofficial/local/hanging_console.patch .


								Christoph