On Sat, Oct 21, 2006 at 12:44:15PM -0400, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
> 
> I'll assert that I have at least my share of "general Unix knowledge" --
> that's why it's not obvious.

Honestly, I think that in this case, though I know very well that you
have the knowledge, you're not applying it.

> I had understood ttyE0 to be a reference to the wscons driver.  If it
> doesn't matter if wscons is on or off, that clearly isn't the case.

Why do you believe that to be so?  /etc/ttys contains literaly dozens of
references to devices which may not be present on any given system; getty
ignores them, if they're turned on, after it emits one short diagnostic
into the system log.  What's so odd about this?

> Either way, I see
> nothing that suggests it's a good idea to try opens on both simultaneously

Indeed, there isn't even anything like that in the text I wrote, so I am
not sure where you got that idea.  Note that the ttys snippet I posted
indicated that init should start getty instances on tty00 and ttyE0 (which
may or may not be present) but *not* on /dev/console.

I note that the console(4) manual page is lacking an explanation of how
the device aliasing works (it works more or less like your first
hypothesis).  I'll add one.

Thor