VTs (was: How to get more developers)

[Norbert Nemec <nobbi@cheerful.com>]

It is userspace - meaning: you have to log in first before you have
consoles. I fins it very comfortable on Linux, to have syslog output sent to
tty12. So no matter what happens, I can simply switch to tty12 and see
what's going on internally in my computer. That will not be possible that
easy in userspace.

It runs on top of VT220 - meaning: Once you send a control sequence that
screws up the VT220 completely (so that you have to chance to type "reset"
any more) you are out of luck. In my time working on Linux, I have had quite
a number of consoles screwed up, but I have never ever been in a situation
that console switching was not possible any more (unless, of course, the
computer was completely dead)

I do not believe that one will ever get a single console with userspace VTs
as reliable as the Linux VTs are.


On Thu, Jul 20, 2000 at 11:59:16PM +0200, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 20, 2000 at 08:08:45PM +0100, Adam Sampson wrote:
> > On Sat, Jul 15, 2000 at 12:16:14AM -0700, Shawn wrote:
> > > I say screw VTs. screen kicks soooo much ass, VTs are a waste of
> > > time.
> > 
> > Hear, hear. All we need is a console driver which is fast and supports
> > a sufficient subset of the VT220 to get screen running; we can then avoid
> > all the complexity than Linux's console has to put up with.
> 
> Well, not really. As our console driver would be in userspace, it can be fat
> and include fancy features like vt's, readline (?, but it is on the task
> list), etc.
> 
> Users who don't want to use this could replace the driver with their
> own implementation. (As far as it makes sense with the console driver).
> 
> Anyway, the bottom line is that user space software wins again :)



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