Re: virtual consoles

[tb@MIT.EDU (Thomas Bushnell, BSG)]

Roland McGrath <roland@frob.com> writes:

> In the long term--and there is no reason one could not implement this right
> away--we would indeed like this to be done outside the kernel in a server,
> and probably term is the right place.  This server would access the
> keyboard and display devices at a lower level, the way the X server does,
> as opposed to the character-oriented kernel console device interface that
> term uses now.

Absolutely!  It's a very ugly wart right now that the Mach console
driver is used to interpret keyboard codes and do terminal emulation.
All that should be in a user-level process; it should be a separate
backend from the `devio' backend that term already has. 

Basically, this needs someone to think up a suitable Mach interface
(pretty much one already exists for keyboard input, IIRC) and then
write the appropriate backend spec for term.

Thomas