On Fri, Feb 25, 2000 at 08:02:20PM +0000, Petr Vandrovec wrote:
> Hi Mike,
> > >Its called fbdev :) Their was discussion on the list about using the
> > >console layer to actually set different mode versus the current method of
> > >using the fbdev layer to alter the console mode. Personally I agree with
> > >you. I think the console layer should handle this.
> > I just want the ability to run a VGA textmode console on a
> > Trident 8900 with 512k of RAM without X windows installed and be
> > able to:
> > 1) Have as many VC's as I like - not restricted by video RAM
> > size.
> 64 is not enough for you? I'm largest VT consumer of all I know and I'm
> satisfied with 24 VTs (currently 25, as 25th is VMware fullscreen).
Well, I'm using (checks /etc/inittab) 54 VTs, which is considerably higher
than 25, and I'm running out of VTs. I keep finding I have to close one to
use something else. I'm thinking about making more, just not sure which
key bindings to give them.
I could easily use more than 64 -- what I do to manage them is I make
groups of 9 VTs using the number pad keys plus a modifier.
Alt-1 to 9 are for web browsing. No modifier, just 1 to 9 jump to shell
prompts in ~/src (customised getty that logins for me). Ctrl-1 to 9, are
shell prompts beginning in ~/.
I've considered using the "screen" program but I have found that swapping
between programs isn't as nice.
I do think 64 is too little, but I think 256 would be sufficient -- but I'm
sure it could be possible that 256 isn't enough for someone.
> > 2) Have the OPTION of having separate scrollback buffers on each
> > VC, each of which can be a different runtime configurable
> > size.
> Well, it was talked about couple of times and always shot down,
> as with 32KB scrollback (current VGAcon does 4KB onscreen + 28KB scrollback)
> it is 32KB per console unswappable memory, and as you may noticed, even
> although such useful thing as devfs consumes 66KB, users complain that
> it is too big. And 32KB * 64 VT = 2MB.
Is there some reason why the memory could not be swapped out? Or could
memory onboard the video card be used to store each scroll back somehow?
(I'm often in text mode w/o X and my video card has 8 megs of RAM)
Really two megs of memory makes very little difference if you look at how
much the applications running on each VT take up. Even ash is likely to
take up more than 32kb (and it may be possible for shells to be swapped out,
but I have found that they're not ..).
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