Subject: Re: Dumb question - switching consoles
To: None <port-sparc@netbsd.org>
From: der Mouse <mouse@Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA>
List: port-sparc
Date: 09/04/2004 01:39:18
>>> I've asked this in IRC a couple times, and the best answer I could
>>> get was that the console driver on architechures that use something
>>> other than PS/2 keyboards.
>> "A verb, Senator!  We need a verb!"  [...]
> It's late damnit :-P

True enough.  But I don't think it's really got anything to do with
PS/2 keyboards, except that both they and framebuffers whose drivers
support this occur almost exclusively on peecees.

Not quite exclusively; some alphas, such as the NoName, support peecee
framebuffers and keyboards.  Some of the later sparc64 machines have
PCI and thus presumably support at least some PCI framebuffers; whether
they also do peecee keyboards I don't know - I've avoided anything that
recent.

> I understood what he was talking about it, because I wanted to do the
> same thing on my sparc box.

I've occasionally wished for it (but only occasionally); it's not
something usually supported in SPARC-land.  (SunOS didn't do it and I'm
fairly sure Solaris didn't either, for example.)  I did something along
such lines at one point, but it was a hacked-up X server rather than
console driver (for my purposes I wanted multiple X sessions, rather
than multiple terminal emulators, on the console hardware - which was
just as well, as I had source to the X server I was using at the time,
but not the kernel).

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