Re: [Linuxconsole-dev] Municon

[Eric S. R. <es...@th...>]

Jim Peters <ji...@ag...>:
> Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> > One big one.  I fear some terminal emulation has to be in the kernel,
> > otherwise the user will lose badly in pathological situations where the
> > hypothetical daemon doesn't start up.  Never forget the run-level 1 case.
> 
> Definitely, yes, there has to be terminal emulation in the kernel.  I'm not
> interested in trying to put a vital function of the kernel into a user-space
> daemon.
> 
> It's just that for me, not being at all familiar with kernel-hacking, trying
> to get this into the kernel seems an unnecessarily hard way of doing it.  I
> can see how it is feasible in user-space, and I believe I can see how it can
> be done without hitting any major obstacles.
> 
> The other thing is that a Chinese user has a lot of glyphs in their
> character-set.  It may be better to keep these out of kernel memory.  Also,
> a lot more allocation and deallocation of memory will be going on - we're
> not working with a fixed grid of characters any more, when the font is
> proportional.  Things need to be more flexible.
> 
> It doesn't feel right for this to be in the kernel.
> 
> Still, I'm open to suggestions -

One of our goals is to turn the emulation code into a module.  Perhaps
the right way to do Municon would be as a combination of a module and
a userspace daemon, the module being tailored to mediate between the
daemon and the underlying console framebuffer.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr">Eric S. Raymond</a>

Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation,
that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defence?  Where is the
difference between having our arms in our own possession and under our
own direction, and having them under the management of Congress?  If
our defence be the *real* object of having those arms, in whose hands
can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in
our own hands?
        -- Patrick Henry, speech of June 9 1788