Re: GGI, EGCS/PGCC, Kernel source

Michael Schmitz (schmitzm@uclink4.berkeley.edu)
Fri, 27 Feb 1998 15:00:18 -0800


At 2:33 AM -0500 2/27/98, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
>On the Linux kernel list, people were specifically talking about
>supporting *serial* terminals that sent PC keycodes, and in the message
>which I quoted, there was discussion of running "ALL tty lines" into
>EvStack.

Yep, but there was never any mention of routing all TTY lines into EvStack
by default (at least as I understood it), only those which serve as
keyboard
lines. And I was not advocating EvStack but another method to take input
from the serial driver, and feed it into the VC input layer (currently
handle_scancode but I'd rather use a separate function there). I admit I
have no
comprehensive understanding of the TTY layer but what I gathered points to a
new line discipline as the best way to achieve this.

> You should know better what that means; I can only guess ... Make that
> an 'if (tty->kbdidx ....' for me. Only the 'keyboard line' should be
> redirected elsewhere.
>
>I have no idea; tty_send_char() isn't in the standard Linux kernel. I
>assume it's from the part of drivers/char/*.c which gets heavily
>rototilled by the GGI patches.

Might be, I've no access to the source at work (lots of pesky Macs but no
Linux).

> No one suggested that :-) In fact, what would be the point of
> filtering kermit data through the keyboard map??
>
>Apparently so you could support serial terminals that emit PC keyboard
>codes..... (I didn't say it was a good reason, mind you!)

Let me try to put it this way: some machines (uClinux) have no keyboard,
others want additional keyboards (multihead graphics independent of GGI).
The serial lines seem to be a good choice. Specific serial lines are
designated as keyboard
input, and somewhere along the way from serial driver to the console code a
translation has to be performed. I'd prefer to do this in some analogue to
handle_scancode (yes, I'm aware that this means calling the tty code again,
like ttyS1 -> keycodes+state -> tty[0-5] instead of kbd -> handle_scancode
-> tty[0-5]). If there's another way (not involving EvStack) please let me
know.

Michael

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