Re: lots of fbdev updates

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

> >   As you can see we have alot of nice updates recently. Everything
> > complies, now to test it. As for the multihead support. I realized this is
> > going to be tougher than I though. I mean massive surgery of the tty
> > layer. 
> 
> Could you give some explanations why you need such heavy changes in the 
> tty layer? KGI does a tiny little patch to fix /dev/console mapping,
> but that's almost all. All the rest is being handled outside.

   Two primary reasons. The first being that fbdev can now support up to
256 video cards in the system. With USB support you can have up to 127
keyboards. So all total you can have 127 fully functional terminals. For
video consoles the tty layer only supports 64 VCs. This is hardcoded :(
From what Gooch told me this also impacts the serial drivers which
count on the first 64 ttys belonging to the video console layer. Soon this
will no longer be the case.
   This brings us to our second reason. Support for hot swappable cards
and insmodable drivers. Here we have to make the tty layer support a way
to dynamically add and subtract a VC pool for each card. 

Q: Why did they deprecate a.out support in linux?
A: Because a nasty coff is bad for your elf.

James Simmons  [jsi...@li...]               ____/| 
fbdev/console/gfx developer                             \ o.O| 
http://www.linux-fbdev.org                               =(_)= 
http://linuxgfx.sourceforge.net                            U
http://linuxconsole.sourceforge.net