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@
. Don't clobber the TERM setting; it's supposed to be done by /etc/ttys
already.
. Comment out the Interviews stuff, 98 % of all users probably won't
ever use it.
. Install the files with better default permissions in the skeleton
directory; pw(8) retains the permissions when creating a new
acount, and installing them read-only is stupid, yet installing
.rhosts world-readable is dangerous.
2.2 candidate
This will make a number of things easier in the future, as well as (finally!)
avoiding the Id-smashing problem which has plagued developers for so long.
Boy, I'm glad we're not using sup anymore. This update would have been
insane otherwise.
