On Tue, 3 Mar 2026, Greg A. Woods wrote:
At Tue, 3 Mar 2026 22:34:01 +0000 (UTC), RVP <[email protected]> wrote:
Edit /etc/ttys and set `constty' (vt100) to `off', and instead, set `ttyE0'
to `on'.
That's arguably wrong, but the rest is very right.
Well, I do that because the other way around (constty on; ttyE0 off) leads
to
1. an inconsistency in the name of the 1st console which leads to issues of
this sort:
https://mail-index.netbsd.org/pkgsrc-users/2024/03/23/msg039239.html
```
$ tty
/dev/constty
$ sysctl -n kern.consdev
ttyE0
```
and,
2. framebuffer graphics code not working because /dev/constty doesn't support
mmap()--it does happily support all the ioctl()s leading up to it.
OTOH, I've found no issues with /dev/ttyE0 being the "console".
Arguably the real bug is in the default /etc/ttys configuration.
For default installs on the majority of "headfull" systems using wscons
emulation the constty terminal type should be wsvt25m (or maybe wsvt25,
see below).
[...]
BTW, I added the following comments to my copy of terminfo to make the
difference between wsvt25 and wsvt25m more clear (and to elucidate the
confusion caused by basing wsvt25 on vt220, which also has various
delays encoded in its terminfo entry, though not so many):
[..]
Ah, thanks for that. I didn't a `wsvt25m' type existed. I've been using the
`.metaesc' kbd variant in /etc/wscons.conf to compensate.
Two FYIs for the people reading this:
1. less(1) is _not_ slow on 10.x. It is only slow on 11.x because this change
was made to less in the interim: less-563 -> less-581.2
(own implementation of tputs(3))
https://github.com/gwsw/less/commit/0af04471e9f80b7d25b38b2d309b98316bb33703
2. And, less, even with that patch, won't be slow on FreeBSD or Linux because
they're both tickless, so a 2ms delay will be a 2ms delay. On NetBSD, a
2ms or 5ms delay will be rounded up to 1/HZ (10 ms, typically), and all
those 10ms delays on each line will add up!
Change HZ to 1000 and NetBSD will be on par with FreeBSD and Linux, I think.
-RVP
