After I imported libteken into the source tree, I noticed syscons didn't
store the cursor position inside the terminal emulator, but inside the
virtual terminal stat. This is not very useful, because when you
implement more complex forms of line wrapping, you need to keep track of
more state than just the cursor position.
Because the kernel messages didn't share the same terminal emulator as
ttyv0, this caused a lot of strange things, like kernel messages being
misplaced and a missing notification to resize the terminal emulator for
kernel messages never to be resized when using vidcontrol.
This patch just removes kernel_console_ts and adds a special parameter
to te_puts to determine whether messages should be printed using regular
colors or the ones for kernel messages.
Reported by: ache
Tested by: nyan, garga (older version)
Some time ago I started working on a library called libteken, which is
terminal emulator. It does not buffer any screen contents, but only
keeps terminal state, such as cursor position, attributes, etc. It
should implement all escape sequences that are implemented by the
cons25 terminal emulator, but also a fair amount of sequences that are
present in VT100 and xterm.
A lot of random notes, which could be of interest to users/developers:
- Even though I'm leaving the terminal type set to `cons25', users can
do experiments with placing `xterm-color' in /etc/ttys. Because we
only implement a subset of features of xterm, this may cause
artifacts. We should consider extending libteken, because in my
opinion xterm is the way to go. Some missing features:
- Keypad application mode (DECKPAM)
- Character sets (SCS)
- libteken is filled with a fair amount of assertions, but unfortunately
we cannot go into the debugger anymore if we fail them. I've done
development of this library almost entirely in userspace. In
sys/dev/syscons/teken there are two applications that can be helpful
when debugging the code:
- teken_demo: a terminal emulator that can be started from a regular
xterm that emulates a terminal using libteken. This application can
be very useful to debug any rendering issues.
- teken_stress: a stress testing application that emulates random
terminal output. libteken has literally survived multiple terabytes
of random input.
- libteken also includes support for UTF-8, but unfortunately our input
layer and font renderer don't support this. If users want to
experiment with UTF-8 support, they can enable `TEKEN_UTF8' in
teken.h. If you recompile your kernel or the teken_demo application,
you can hold some nice experiments.
- I've left PC98 the way it is right now. The PC98 platform has a custom
syscons renderer, which supports some form of localised input. Maybe
we should port PC98 to libteken by the time syscons supports UTF-8?
- I've removed the `dumb' terminal emulator. It has been broken for
years. It hasn't survived the `struct proc' -> `struct thread'
conversion.
- To prevent confusion among people that want to hack on libteken:
unlike syscons, the state machines that parse the escape sequences are
machine generated. This means that if you want to add new escape
sequences, you have to add an entry to the `sequences' file. This will
cause new entries to be added to `teken_state.h'.
- Any rendering artifacts that didn't occur prior to this commit are by
accident. They should be reported to me, so I can fix them.
Discussed on: current@, hackers@
Discussed with: philip (at 25C3)
The last half year I've been working on a replacement TTY layer for the
FreeBSD kernel. The new TTY layer was designed to improve the following:
- Improved driver model:
The old TTY layer has a driver model that is not abstract enough to
make it friendly to use. A good example is the output path, where the
device drivers directly access the output buffers. This means that an
in-kernel PPP implementation must always convert network buffers into
TTY buffers.
If a PPP implementation would be built on top of the new TTY layer
(still needs a hooks layer, though), it would allow the PPP
implementation to directly hand the data to the TTY driver.
- Improved hotplugging:
With the old TTY layer, it isn't entirely safe to destroy TTY's from
the system. This implementation has a two-step destructing design,
where the driver first abandons the TTY. After all threads have left
the TTY, the TTY layer calls a routine in the driver, which can be
used to free resources (unit numbers, etc).
The pts(4) driver also implements this feature, which means
posix_openpt() will now return PTY's that are created on the fly.
- Improved performance:
One of the major improvements is the per-TTY mutex, which is expected
to improve scalability when compared to the old Giant locking.
Another change is the unbuffered copying to userspace, which is both
used on TTY device nodes and PTY masters.
Upgrading should be quite straightforward. Unlike previous versions,
existing kernel configuration files do not need to be changed, except
when they reference device drivers that are listed in UPDATING.
Obtained from: //depot/projects/mpsafetty/...
Approved by: philip (ex-mentor)
Discussed: on the lists, at BSDCan, at the DevSummit
Sponsored by: Snow B.V., the Netherlands
dcons(4) fixed by: kan
