Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 25 Feb 2000 08:20:22 +0100 | From | Dominik Kubla <> | Subject | Re: Linux console driver maintainer? |
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On Thu, Feb 24, 2000 at 12:18:18PM -0500, Mike A. Harris wrote: > On Thu, 24 Feb 2000, James A Simmons wrote: > > >Linus orginally wrote it. It has been modified but it really hasn't > >changed much. When 2.5.X comes out this will change. Several people will > >be working on the new console system. > > Who? I'd like to see their code/ideas, etc.. Perhaps test out > existing effort... >
I am pretty sure James was not referring to me but i have kept hacking on the console code on and off for the last two years, trying to make it a full ECMA (or ISO/IEC what ever you prefer) implementation with as much DEC VT compatibility as possible.
Attached is a work-in-progress patch against 2.3.40. Right now i am thinking about how to implement real underlined, double underlined, overlined, rapidly blinking attributes etc. That touches the fb drivers as well. (Explanation: the IBM MDA/Hercules adaptors had underlined attribute, CGA/EGA/VGA not. Instead the console driver mapped it to a color attribute. With framebuffer console becoming the standard, this is no longer necessary)
The most difficult part (other than ECMA/ISO conformant character and font handling) will be to implement bi-directionality (IIRC some languages write right-to-left while numbers are written left-to-right, or people might want to mix languages, so simply switching the character progression does not cut it, there is more to do and that's why ECMA/ISO implements special control functions for it).
The easiest part will be to implement ECMA/ISO conformant color handling (the ECMA/ISO sequences have defined colors like black, white red, magenta,... instead of color registers).
Yours, Dominik Kubla
PS. And before someone thats to argue that this patch changes a lot of code only cosmetically: console.c is so larges that it becomes unmaintainable IMHO. So some of the changes are in preparation of splitting it up into the device handling part, the console switching stuff and the terminal emulation (which then could be made configurable. who knows somemone might prefere a HP or Siemens emluation to DEC...) [unhandled content-type:application/octet-stream] | |