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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!hamblin.math.byu.edu!news.byu.edu!cwis.isu.edu!u.cc.utah.edu!cs.weber.edu!terry From: terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc Subject: Common console driver interface Date: 16 Nov 1993 04:53:05 GMT Organization: Weber State University, Ogden, UT Lines: 67 Message-ID: <2c9mbh$eof@u.cc.utah.edu> References: <CGD.93Nov14105344@eden.CS.Berkeley.EDU> <CGIB20.7xs@aib.com> <MYCROFT.93Nov14202720@duality.gnu.ai.mit.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: cs.weber.edu In article <MYCROFT.93Nov14202720@duality.gnu.ai.mit.edu> mycroft@duality.gnu.ai.mit.edu (Charles Hannum) writes: [ ... ] > There WAS a task force that was going to try to resolve all of this > for us - to come up with a single common API for the console > driver. > >And once again, you show quite clearly that you have not bothered to >check your facts. I was on the console mailing list; I know what >happened. They got stuck in the rathole of trying to design the >ultimate driver and never actually produced a usable spec or code to >match. Actually, the reason this petered out was because several things happened simultaneously: 1) Julian went back to Australia, losing net access for a long time; this is important because the mailing list was both maintained and moderated by Julian, meaning that we could send things, but they would bounce. Even if they didn't, they would have ended up in an inbox somewhere. 2) I lost the ability to contribute source code and designs to the project right after sending out my LKM code to both BSD groups when the company I worked for bought another company and put me in a position where it could potentially be a interpreted as a conflict of interest to continue. 3) The ref.tfs.com site, without Julian, was shut down, and there was no longer a central site for beta code to be exchanged (an exchange of designs and code in the newsgroups was out of the question; we did not want them to be considered patches and we wanted to ensure a higher level of discussion than could occur in a newsgroup). All design documents are available; the architecture of the design was completed (with compromises by both myself and Dr. Holger Veit -- we were both very interested in internationalization and localization to native language, but were overruled -- yes, we *voted* and *accepted* the outcome of the *vote*); it is available to interested parties. Preliminary work had been done on API specification (full function prototypes), and the last act of my involvement was the release of the LKM beta code, which I perceived as core technology to either of the two major design camps. Even though we had agreed on an architecture, I had begun the LKM code as part of getting shared libraries up using alternate a.out formats, and pushed that code ahead of the shared library work -- much to my later disdain -- to provide the core console driver technology. Admittedly, there were a number of radical suggestions (mostly by myself and Dr. Veit) regarding moving all of the Device Dependent X code into a seperate card driver module to get around the kernel debugger, console switching, Unicode display, and DOS emulation issues, but these never superceded going forward on the main issue, which was a first revision common X interface and support for emulation "personailities". A "rathole" is an unfair characterization. Terry Lambert terry@cs.weber.edu --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.