I like the EvStack concept of consoles consisting of a series of
pluggable event handler/router modules. I like the idea of the kernel
having a generic, flexible and fast way to pass abstract messages between
itself and userspace. And I like the idea that any console IO device, no
matter how wierd, can have all its capabilities encapsulated into a set of
abstracted messages.
That last is very important for graphics hardware, where the
feature set that can be exported by the kernel to userspace varies widely
from card to card. But the same message-based paradigm can allow any sort
of odd device to be easily supported by Linux - just write a kernel driver
that wraps a thin message layer over the raw hardware functionality and
let the userspace stacks contain the logic the glues the devices together
into a "console".
Fast? Generic? Message passing?
I take it you're not familiar with that performance abomination known as
System V Streams --- beloved by the formal computer science types for
being clean --- and cursed by those who wanted a fast and efficient
network stack.
- Ted
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