Needless to say theat the current situation wrt console
drivers is a mess. This is most true for the i386, but at least
alpha and bebox have similar hardware and could share
some code.
The issue of a new mi console subsystem is still outstanding;
it is worked on with low priority, and to achieve the
functionality people know from PCVT will take a while.

To make things a bit cleaner and to make it easier to plug in
alternate console drivers while allowing coexistence with
the old ones, I propose the following:

-Use an mi driver for the ISA keyboard controller, PC
  keyboard and "pms" mouse, put it to sys/dev/isa. The
  drivers provide a very generic interface which allows
  to use them with the existing PC hardware console drivers.
  i.e., they simply deliver raw data without any mapping
  functions nor tty/cdevsw interface.
-Rip out the keyboard hardware access stuff from the port
  specific pccons, pcvt, pckbd and pms drivers and use the
  access functions of the mi driver instead.

This is of course only half of the game - the video access
is still not mi and probably even impossible to do in a
comparably generic way. It is an advantage imo to have
the physical keyboard controller access unified because
this piece of hardware is somehow strange and all the
nasty things have only to be done once. The mouse would
not be longer be attached to the console drivers - this was
a gross hack.

So, what do you think? Does it make sense, it is worth
the effort?

best regards
Matthias