Marcus Brinkmann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I still have no clear picture of what the system console is in your > opinion. In your first mail, you say that init must start the > console, because it may be "fancy" and require proc and auth. But in > my opinion, it is a fundamental flaw to rely on a fancy console as the > system console. The system console in my eyes is for example a > dedicated serial line, or a dumb terminal a la Mach's console, with > the one improvement that it doesn't interfere with other video card > using programs later on.
For these purposes, the "console" should have three properties. It is an accident of language that the word "console" could refer to the big fancy user-land interaction agent, and also the way that core system things have of alerting someone when the world is birthing or dieing. I'm speaking only of the latter. So here are the properties: * It should be able to be written on when other things are absent or failing--that is, using it should not require a gajillion other processes to be functioning; * What gets written on it should, in the normal course of events, migrate to syslog eventually (note than in BSD this is true for things at boot time *and* at crash time!) * It should not rely on a special freaky Mach kernel feature. There are two kinds of consoles: * a "normal" console, * a "magic" console. A normal console *might* be the very same program as a big fancy user-land interaction agent, provided that this agent is safe enough. A magic console is a necessary thing to tolerate. It's a way for programs to write on "the console" when they are the only beast in the world. Right now they use the Mach "console" device. That's a bug. That device will vanish like the wind when we strip away the Mach terminal code once and for all. A totally different question is "what hardware is the console", for which the answer is: the user's one and only video screen, or a dedicated serial line. Some hardware has a special "console" terminal already. This question is not at all important to the above, except that the user's one and only video screen must be an option. I'm not addressing that totally different question *at all*. Right now, we are doing a horrible thing. We open the Mach device named "console" (a feature we are planning to remove from Mach anyway); we are casual and careless about where that port is passed around, including storing it in wildly inappropriate places, like file descriptor tables; init never bothers to open /dev/console for the users the way BSD does (and it's a mistake that Linux does not); we don't capture anything written on it for logging; etc. Thomas _______________________________________________ Bug-hurd mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-hurd
