/dev/tty1..tty6, Alt+F1..F6 or `chvt N`. Each is an independent terminal --
its own screen, cursor, line discipline, foreground process group and
session. Two shells on two terminals are unrelated processes that share a
keyboard and a screen.
What made it possible is a backing store. The console drew straight into the
framebuffer and scrolled by moving pixels, which works exactly as long as
nothing else wants the screen: there was nowhere to put terminal 2 while
terminal 1 was visible, and nothing to repaint terminal 1 from. Each terminal
owns a grid of cells now and the framebuffer shows whichever grid is active,
so vt_switch() is set-index, repaint, return -- nothing is saved on the way
out because the outgoing grid has been current all along.
The rule the layer is built on: a terminal does not know whether it is
visible. Writes land in the grid, the cursor moves, the grid scrolls, all
unconditionally; drawing is one question asked at the bottom of vt.c. Every
alternative spreads "am I on screen" through the escape parser, and then a
terminal switched away from mid-sequence comes back wrong.
Everything that was a single global is per-terminal now: tty_fg_pgrp (deleted),
termios, the input ring, the escape parser, the UTF-8 decoder, and the cursor
-- which also stops being pixels in gfx.c and becomes cells in the terminal.
TIOCSCTTY was `return 0` and now records proc->ctty, which is what /dev/tty
resolves through; /dev/tty was an alias for /dev/console with the same minor,
and they are different questions.
kbd.c names Alt+F1..F6 as KEY_ALT_F1+n, above 0xFF on purpose -- every byte
value is already a character or a UTF-8 continuation, and a chord colliding
with one would be typed into the terminal instead of switching away from it.
What the chord means is decided in console.c, where the terminals are.
VT_ACTIVATE / VT_WAITACTIVE / VT_GETSTATE / VT_OPENQRY, Linux's numbers.
The argument to ACTIVATE is by value, not a pointer -- same shape as TCFLSH.
Two bugs found by screenshotting the result rather than reading the log:
- zsh emits 0x0F to leave alt-charset mode, because that is what the `linux`
terminfo says rmacs is, and the console drew CP437 glyph 0x0F: a sun, in
the prompt, on every line. A terminal never draws a C0 control character.
- SGR 7 was unimplemented, so zsh's partial-line marker rendered as a bare
'#' instead of a reversed block. Reverse video swaps the colours at draw
time, not at store time, so turning it off restores what was underneath.
Verified by screendump: tty1 and tty2 show different screens, and switching
back repaints tty1's earlier content from its grid. schfs-check passes.
docs/architecture/terminals.md, including what it does not do -- no
scrollback, no reflow, no VT_PROCESS mode for a display server to veto a
switch, which Schcom will need before it owns Alt+F7.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VQ7Qx8E1q1M1bbCq8QLHS2
Same disease as the network stack, one subsystem over. kernel/dev/vga.c
was three things wearing one name: the owner of the framebuffer, a
bitmap drawing library, and the text console. Only the first is a
driver, and because they shared a file they shared a prefix -- so
panic.c drew the crash screen with vga_fill_rect, console.c printed with
vga_putc, /dev/fb0 handed out vga_fb_phys, and every one of those files
named a display driver it had no business knowing about.
Split three ways:
- kernel/drivers/gpu/vga/vga_fb.c owns the VBE framebuffer -- the mode
the loader programmed and handed over, the aperture, and the display
class vtable. It is a driver and now lives with the driver that
finds the card on the bus.
- kernel/dev/gfx.c draws: pixels, shapes, glyphs, the cursor, scroll,
the ANSI erase operations. It names no driver. The framebuffer
arrives through gfx_attach_scanout(), so a driver publishes what it
owns and this file draws on it without knowing what it is.
- include/gfx.h is the interface, and says why it is deliberately not
the display class: that one is about frames -- acquire, present,
vblank -- and the crash screen has to work when nothing else does.
main() no longer calls a display driver. platform_register_devices()
takes the framebuffer address and brings up whatever owns it, which is
where driver names belong; kernel/drivers/registry.c is the file whose
entire job is naming every driver in the kernel.
virtio-gpu got the e1000 treatment as well: instances in an array, the
instance hung on dev->priv by an `attached` hook, and every op reading
it rather than a file-static. It refused the second adapter outright
before, which is not hypothetical -- integrated plus discrete is an
ordinary laptop. The VGA driver deliberately has no such hook, and says
so: there is one framebuffer the loader programmed however many
VGA-class controllers the bus turns up, and a second one publishing the
same scanout is the truth rather than a bug.
Private headers moved next to their drivers: include/virtio.h and
include/xhci.h each had exactly one includer. include/ is for headers
the rest of the kernel needs.
Deleted rather than moved: consoleinit() programmed the sixteen ANSI
colours into the VGA DAC and disabled text-mode blink, by writing ports
0x3C0-0x3C9 from the console. The comment three lines above the colour
table already said this does nothing in a 32bpp linear mode -- there is
no palette to index -- so it was both dead and in the wrong file.
Verified, and this is a refactor so the evidence is that nothing moved:
- bootcheck -Fb -Net: 59 [ok], no failures. That covers the console
through every command, /dev/fb0's geometry, writing pixels through
write() and mapping the framebuffer through mmap.
- make crashshot: the crash screen renders exactly as before --
shapes, glyphs, logo and QR code -- which is the whole of gfx.c
exercised at once, in a panic, with the scanout attached by a driver.
- make schcom-test: five pixel assertions from the host oracle still
pass, so the display class and the compositor above it are unmoved.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Nexoniarz