Re: keyboard scancodes

James Simmons (jsimmons@edgeglobal.com)
Sat, 11 Dec 1999 20:08:24 -0500 (EST)


> The console driver itself can be changed to support multihead very easily
> (except for a few places like console blanking it's sufficient to redefine
> the IS_FG and IS_VISIBLE macros), but the console ioctl's and fbcon need
> some serious work since they expect only one console can be active at a time.

The consoel does need more work than that. Since the console system was
designed for one head than the code was naturally SMP safe. When you have
SMP and a multiheaded system you have the change of two heads running at
the same time. This can run into severe problems. Also what do you do for
systems that have two framebuffers and one keyboard. Or two keyboards and
one framebuffer. Their is need to support 16 bit characters so you can
display asian languages. So many changes are in store for the console
system.
As for fbcon. Yes we are working on making it as multiheaded as much as
possible without touching the console code.

> Vojtech's input patches contain some parts of my multihead console work,
> but since then I didn't have enough free time to continue... :(

Don't worry I will be working on this right after 2.4.x comes out.

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