Re: Diff to show my work

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

> Hi,
>   is it complete diff between Linus/Alan tree and current linuxconsole
> CVS or is it an addition to linuxconsole CVS (I did not look at patch
> yet and because of I have no linuxconsole CVS copy here yet, I'm asking...) 

Its a diff against the current ruby tree. If it was against linus tree it
would have been twice as big. 

> I think that for backward compatibility you should add new ioctl
> OPENVT2, which opens VT on specific output device. Old code (simple
> open /dev/tty* and OPENVT ioctl) should use same lowlevel device as
> current->tty uses... I think... Probably with exception that if
> current->tty is not VT, you should use first head (for use by init, for
> example, which is connected to /dev/console).

I was thinking about that as well. I know we need a way to allocate more
VCs for a head. Once we remove the 64 limit and we can use devfs to create
VCs on the fly :) As for allocating VCs for a different head then we are
on. Do we really need this? 

> Create per-VT blanking timers which will expire individually and which
> are restarted on keypress (on that VT) and console switch... Looks like
> easiest solution to me. 

The problem is telling the blanking routines which head is the one to
unblank. Right now I haven't seen away to do this. 

> Another solution is glue it together as 'seat'
> (all kbds, mouses and monitors at one place), but this does not
> work correctly if you take into account that app can disable blanking
> for such VT (XFree and fbtv does it, for example). 

I noticed that as well :(

> Only unfortunate thing 
> is that currently setting VT blanking period is per-system and not per-VT. 

Right. I want to see it per VT as well. If we have several people at different
VTs attached to one workstation we don't want all the heads to blank out 
when one person walks away for awhile from his desk. That would be annoying.