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)
RSC (Remote System Control) connected via uart2 as console working out
of the box. On machines that use uart2 to connect a keyboard and thus
the ttyu2 node doesn't exist this will trigger a warning from getty(8)
but cause no real harm.
MFC after: 1 week
GENERIC comment in ttyN.
- Add the name of the device driver creating the device nodes above the
respectives blocks so it's easier for user to find the right entry to
shut up warnings from getty(8). Replace 'Requires device 'uart' be
enabled.' with just 'uart(4)' as the former referred to a sparc64
GENERIC back when uart(4) wasn't enabled by default, yet.
- Turn off the getty(8) on screen as screen is created by ofw_console(4)
which is no longer enabled in the sparc64 GENERIC (and also only is a
last resort) to shut up warnings from getty(8) with the current GENERIC.
can't be removed as ofw_console(4) and zs(4) use them so one has to
live with some complaints about non-existent devices at boot time and
remove the respective entries locally for now.
install now complains about ttyu0/ttyu1 not existing at boot time.
Since users wanting the uart based devices as terminals will need
to do something special to get them anyway set it up so a default
config doesn't complain.
MFC after: 3 days
dcons(4): very simple console and gdb port driver
dcons_crom(4): FireWire attachment
dconschat(8): User interface to dcons
Tested with: i386, i386-PAE, and sparc64.
All functionality from the previous system has been preserved, and
users should still customize their system boot with the familiar
methods, rc.conf, rc.conf.local, rc.firewall, sysctl.conf, etc.
Users who have customized versions of scripts that have been removed
should take great care when upgrading, since the compatibility code
that used those old scripts has also been removed.
name of the device that it creates. Update /etc/ttys accordingly.
An alias is created for the old name so that old /etc/ttys will continue to
work, but due to aliases being implemented as symlinks in devfs you cannot
login as root when using the alias device.
Discussed with: grehan
- The disktab was taken from etc.alpha.
- rc.sparc64 doesn't do anything right now.
- The ttys file has all the vty's commented out since we don't know how
those will work yet. Also, an entry is added for the Openfirmware
console device.
Submitted by: jake (partially)
