dwex@cbnewsj.att.com (david.e.wexelblat) (05/03/91)
I am planning to put together a small replacement for wind.o for 3B1 systems that have pitched UA/wind.o. Basically, I am tired of the glass-tty when logged in without running MGR, and also want a screen-blanker that runs without MGR (I don't want to give up my loadable-driver space to wind.o for the small amount I need done). What I intend is to have a window driver that provides: - screen blanking, and can accept ioctls from scrset (I see no need to have yet another program to do this) - a vt100-subset console. I figure that I can get the screen blanking done pretty quickly; I have most of the interface figured out (anyone who knows how this is implemented in wind.o is free to help me out :->) from looking at the nkbd.c sources and a bit of judicous adb'ing. What I haven't figured out yet is, once I have this running on /dev/syscon (or whatever), how do I make the driver know to stop interpreting characters, and just pass them on when MGR is running? I've thought of a couple of schemes, which may be equivalent: - create a /dev/framebuf device, with the same major device as /dev/syscon, but a different minor number. When MGR opens this device, the character- interpretation stops. This allows getty to hang off of /dev/syscon, and when MGR exits, things go back to normal. - have an ioctl() to do the same thing, and have MGR call this on startup. Actually, it just dawned on me that MGR doesn't write to /dev/syscon; it writes directly to the frame buffer. So if my driver just implements write(), then there is no problem (except for turning off cursors and stuff, since I like blinking cursors). Please email me your suggestions, or post followups to comp.sys.3b1. I will take all suggestions into consideration, and will post the results when I am happy with it (which may be never - I have a tendency to get too fancy for my own good :->). -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- David Wexelblat | dwex@mtgzz.att.com | I asked her her name. AT&T Bell Laboratories | ...!att!mtgzz!dwex | She said her name was 200 Laurel Ave - 4B-421 | | 'Maybe' Middletown, NJ 07748 | (201) 957-5871 | --Damn Yankees