Gueven Bay wrote:
What was the reason that virtual terminals are removed from Solaris some time
ago?
They were only supported in the x86 console driver and were
removed when that driver was replaced with a console driver
shared between sparc and x86 in Solaris 8. The ARC case to
announce the EOF ("End of Feature") of the things only found
in the old driver said:
We need to replace the Solaris/Intel console subsystem with
one that is more modular and less crufty. There are a variety
of reasons, but the most immediate and compelling is the need
to support USB keyboards.
In a Solaris release after September 1, 1999, the console
subsystem for Solaris/Intel will be replaced with one that
is more compatible with Solaris/SPARC and allows for future
extensibility. This will invalidate a large number of
undocumented and unsupported interfaces, and a few
documented interfaces:
Documented:
pcmapkeys(1)
loadfont(1)
loadfont(4)
Undocumented / Unsupported:
KD* ioctls
"VT" support
/dev/vt*
"AT386" terminal type (becomes "sun")
In the case that actually replaced the console driver, the VT support was
described by the project team as little used and unnecessary:
c) "VT" support. Virtual Terminal support, a mechanism allowing
multiple terminal sessions on the same hardware without a
window system, has been present in most if not all
Solaris/Intel releases, sometimes working, sometimes not.
It has been officially supported only on "Solaris 2.4 Base
Server", but the support is fully present in Solaris 2.6
and can be enabled through undocumented configuration file
changes. It is reported that some users are aware of these
mechanisms and use them. This project removes those
mechanisms. These users can either use utilities like
"screen" or a window system to achieve their goals.
("screen" is a user-mode multiple-session application
for character terminals.)
It appears the ARC accepted this explanation since it the case was approved.
--
-Alan Coopersmith- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering
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