Re: [Linuxconsole-dev] comments on multi-heading/console

[James S. <jsi...@ac...>]

> Hi.  I've seen a lot of good stuff written in this list so far.  (and were 
> not even a week old ;)

Its just starting :) The number of people interested keeps growing. Even
Eric Raymond is involved in this project. 
 
> also, another possiblity would be to make solid api's for the fb, and 
> inputX, then create whatever console code you wanted in userspace, bypassing 
> any of linus's kernel decisions.  

Personally I think this is the best approach for multihead aware programs.
A VT should just be a one keyboard and one display. I used to think it was
a cool idea to map a multiple devices like several display or several
keyboards to a VT. So a VT would be 3 display and 2 keyboards and other
crazy combos. Fbdev sort of does this now. It maps a console to a display.
With working with fbdev I realize now its a PITA. Know I think its better
if a app wants to be multihead aware to open the explict hardware devices
and grab them for themselves. Now of course the kernel has to see if
someone is using a VT for any device you want to explictly use. Take
/dev/fb. You wouldn't want to be on a console and then all the sudden a X
session starts because someone ran X on anther station requestion that
head you are on. I really like to see the X server some day just using
/dev/input and /dev/fb instead of any VTs like its does now.  

"Look its a text editor, not its a OS, no it Emacs"
James Simmons                                           ____/| 
fbdev/gfx developer                                     \ o.O| 
http://www.linux-fbdev.org                               =(_)= 
http://linuxgfx.sourceforge.net                            U