Amitai Schlair wrote:
> 
> Bill Studenmund wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, 21 Jan 1998, Amitai Schlair wrote:
> > 
> > > I just had a thought: once color video is well understood across the
> > > various 68K Macs, it'd be tremendously nifty to integrate color-capable
> > > virtual consoles (based on dt) into the kernel.
> > 
> > I agree with everything you said except the in-the-kernel part. dt used to
> > be in the kernel, and was moved out for a reason (though I wasn't around
> > for it).
> 
> I'd guess (I wasn't around either, not by a long shot) that the reason
> was the lack of a solid all-around video driver. All the free x86 UNIXes
> I know of have VTs in the kernel, and they can do this because the video
> drivers work robustly on all kinds of machines.

I don't think that was it at all (don't worry, I wasn't around either, I
believe this was before the NetBSD 0.9 integration, back in the days of
Alice :-)

I have a feeling it was simply easier to have code for a single console.
Also, having 'dt' in userland does make it somewhat easier to maintain.
I'm not entirely sure what kind of gain you'd see from having it in the
kernel.  You could probably hack it to run at startup if you want it that
badly (compile it in multi-login mode, maybe start it from rc.local and
turn off getty on the console)....
 
> Another minor problem might be to handle the special case where there is
> no local console (i.e., running headless). AFAIK dt doesn't handle this
> well at all.

Well....in that case, the grf devices probably wouldn't configure 
correctly, so it wouldn't be all that bad, I wouldn't think...of course, I
don't know that much about our grf devices, so take all I've said with a
grain of salt :-)

Later.

-- 
Colin Wood                                 cwood@ichips.intel.com
Component Design Engineer - MD6                 Intel Corporation
-----------------------------------------------------------------
I speak only on my own behalf, not for my employer.