AH!  Much becomes clearer!
   
it doesn't help when >3 people are yelling much the same thing
at each other :)

   [mrg said that it was not cleanly possible to find the owner of
    /dev/console from within the kernel...]

(or something. i'm not yet -aware- of a clean solution)
   
   Are you SURE about that?  The console has a vp associated with it,
   it seems; it should be possible to get the stat information associated
   with that vnode without much of a problem.   But, of course, I'm not
   getting the whole picture.

i've been playing with this and i don't seem to be able to get
anything useful/sane so far.  but feel free to find me wrong! :)