Right now syscons(4) uses a cons25-style terminal emulator. The
disadvantages of that are:
- Little compatibility with embedded devices with serial interfaces.
- Bad bandwidth efficiency, mainly because of the lack of scrolling
regions.
- A very hard transition path to support for modern character sets like
UTF-8.
Our terminal emulation library, libteken, has been supporting
xterm-style terminal emulation for months, so flip the switch and make
everyone use an xterm-style console driver.
I still have to enable this on i386. Right now pc98 and i386 share the
same /etc/ttys file. I'm not going to switch pc98, because it uses its
own Kanji-capable cons25 emulator.
IMPORTANT: What to do if things go wrong (i.e. graphical artifacts):
- Run the application inside script(1), try to reduce the problem and
send me the log file.
- In the mean time, you can run `vidcontrol -T cons25' and `export
TERM=cons25' so you can run applications the same way you did before.
You can also build your kernel with `options TEKEN_CONS25' to make all
virtual terminals use the cons25 emulator by default.
Discussed on: current@
vt220 will not work better. Even though it probably will remove warnings
about unknown terminal types, a cons25 emulator is not compatible with
vt220 at all.
Even though I increased the amount of pts(4) entries in /etc/ttys some
time ago, I didn't realize back then those entries shouldn't have been
there in the first place.
I just looked at the getttyent() source code and it turns out when you
call setttyent(), it walks through /dev/pts and looks for the device
with the highest number. After you receive EOF's from getttyent(), it
makes up entries for pts(4) devices.
This means that adding entries for pts(4) is somewhat harmful, because
if you now traverse the list, you get redundant entries, so just remove
them.
As discussed with Robert Watson on the src-committers list, it is safer
to keep at least some pty(4) entries in /etc/ttys, for applications that
roll their own PTY allocation routine and only search for BSD-style
PTY's.
This means we've now just toggled the amount of entries for pts(4) and
pty(4).
Requested by: rwatson
Because we now use pts(4)-style PTY's exclusively, there is no use for
these entries in /etc/ttys. Right now the pts(4) entries only go from 0
to 255. Because we're going to touch these files anyway, increase the
number to 511.
Discussed with: philip (ex-mentor)
