# Virtual terminals Six of them, `/dev/tty1` through `/dev/tty6`. | | | |---|---| | **AltGr+F1 .. F6** | go to that terminal | | **AltGr+-** / **AltGr+=** | previous / next terminal *in use* | | `chvt N` | the same, from a script or a serial console | The chord is settable — `chvt -c` — for the reasons below. Each one is an independent terminal: its own screen, its own cursor, its own line discipline, its own foreground process group and its own session. Two shells on two terminals are two unrelated processes that happen to share a keyboard and a screen. A seventh is deliberately not bound. That is where a display server goes, and it will claim switching with `VT_SETMODE` rather than a chord. --- ## What makes switching possible A backing store, and nothing else. Before this, the console drew straight into the framebuffer and scrolled by moving pixels. That works exactly as long as nothing else ever wants the screen: there was nowhere to put terminal 2 while terminal 1 was visible, and nothing to repaint terminal 1 from when it came back. So each terminal owns a grid of cells and the framebuffer shows whichever grid is active. `vt_switch()` is three lines — set the active index, repaint from the grid, return — because nothing has to be *saved* on the way out. The outgoing terminal's grid has been current all along. The rule the whole 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 of it unconditionally. Drawing is a separate question, asked once, at the bottom of `kernel/dev/vt.c`, answered by comparing against `vt_active`. Every alternative spreads "am I on screen" through the escape parser, and then a terminal switched away from mid-sequence comes back wrong. ## A cell Eight bytes: | | | |---|---| | `ch` | the Unicode codepoint, 32 bits | | `fg`, `bg` | palette indices, 0-15 ANSI plus two theme defaults | | `attr` | reverse video; room for underline and the rest | | `pad` | to eight, so the grid indexes without a multiply | `ch` was one byte holding a CP437 glyph, not a codepoint: the console mapped UTF-8 down to CP437 on the way in, because that is what `include/font.h` contained. Widening it to the codepoint is what made Ą, Ę, Ś, Ω and the rest possible, and no font change could have done it alone — a byte cannot *hold* U+0104 whatever is drawing it. Mapping on the way in also meant the decision was made once, at write time, and a later font could not revisit it. The cost is real: the grid went from four bytes per cell to eight, and six terminals at 240x75 is 864 KB of BSS rather than 432 KB. Paid once at link time, which is the only way to pay it — there is no contiguous multi-page allocator to ask. The colours stay indices rather than RGB, for the same reason they always were: a cell holding two 32-bit colours would be sixteen bytes. ## What is per-terminal Everything that used to be a single global: | Was | Now | |---|---| | `int tty_fg_pgrp = 1;` | `v->fg_pgrp`, one per terminal | | one `struct termios tio` | `v->tio` | | one 256-byte input ring | `v->in` | | one escape-parser state | `v->esc_*` | | one UTF-8 decoder | `v->u8_*` | | one cursor, in pixels, in `gfx.c` | `v->cx`, `v->cy`, in cells | `TIOCSCTTY` used to be `return 0` — it claimed to make a terminal the caller's controlling terminal and did nothing, because there was one terminal and nothing to choose between. It records `proc->ctty` now, which is what `/dev/tty` resolves through. ## The devices | Path | Minor | What | |---|---|---| | `/dev/console` | 1 | the **active** terminal, so kernel messages follow a switch | | `/dev/tty` | 10 | the caller's **controlling** terminal, via `proc->ctty` | | `/dev/tty1`..`tty6` | 11-16 | that terminal, whether or not it is on screen | `/dev/tty` was an alias for `/dev/console` with the same major and minor. They are different questions and now have different answers. ## The ioctls Linux's numbers, because they do Linux's job. | | | |---|---| | `VT_ACTIVATE` | switch. Argument is a 1-based number **by value**, not a pointer | | `VT_WAITACTIVE` | returns immediately: `vt_switch` repaints synchronously, so there is nothing left to wait for | | `VT_GETSTATE` | active terminal and a bitmask of those in use | | `VT_OPENQRY` | the first terminal nobody has open | | `VT_GETMODE`/`VT_SETMODE` | accepted and ignored — the kernel drives switching and there is no process mode to set | | `VT_GETCHORD`/`VT_SETCHORD` | SchOS's own: which key combination switches. See below | | `KB_GETLAYOUT`/`KB_SETLAYOUT`/`KB_LISTLAYOUT` | SchOS's own: the keyboard layout, by name | ## The keyboard `kbd.c` turns scancodes into characters and chords. `keymap.c` holds the layouts. Between them is one rule, and it is the rule the whole keycode space is built around: > **A key produces either a Unicode codepoint or a value above `0x10FFFF`. > Nothing in between means anything.** The chord codes always obeyed it. The navigation keys did not: `KEY_UP` was `0xE2`, and `0xE0..0xE9` are exactly the UTF-8 lead bytes for three-byte characters. Typing any of U+0800..U+FFFF — most punctuation, every arrow, every maths symbol, the whole of CJK — produced a value the console read as an arrow key and turned into `ESC [ A`. `∞`, `→`, `≤` and `'` vanished from the input line while `ą` and `ę` came through, because those are two-byte sequences whose lead byte is `0xC4` and nothing claimed `0xC4`. They are `KBD_*` now and sit above every codepoint there is. What the chord *means* is decided in `console.c`, where the terminals are. The keyboard driver names it and stops. ### Layouts Three, in the kernel: `us`, `pl` (Polish programmers), `de` (QWERTZ). `loadkeys` lists and switches them; `/etc/vconsole.conf` records the choice and the `os.schos.keymap` job applies it at boot. **In the kernel, not in files.** Linux's `loadkeys` compiles a text keymap and uploads it a key at a time through `KDSKBENT`, which puts the data in userspace — and a machine whose `/usr` has not mounted then has no layout at all. Here the kernel always has a working keyboard and userspace only names which one. A layout is four tables of codepoints — plain, Shift, AltGr, Shift+AltGr — indexed by scancode. Two things are deliberately *not* tables: - **Ctrl is derived from the plain codepoint**, not looked up. The table it replaced was indexed by scancode, which quietly assumed US: on QWERTZ the Z and Y keys swap, so Ctrl+Z would have suspended a job only on some layouts. - **Caps Lock is a case toggle on the result**, so `ą` from the AltGr level becomes `Ą` — which no second table could have said, because Caps Lock combines with AltGr rather than replacing it. Codepoints and not bytes is the entire point: `ó` fits in Latin-1 and `ą` does not, and half a Polish alphabet is not a Polish layout. `kbdgetc()` encodes to UTF-8 and hands the bytes to `consoleintr()` one call at a time, because that function's contract is bytes — the serial line delivers UTF-8 already and nothing could tell an encoded codepoint from a byte of the same value. **No dead keys.** On a real German layout the acute and circumflex keys wait for the next key and combine; here they type the accent alone. It needs per-keyboard pending state that this interface has no room for, so layouts that depend on it — French AZERTY, Spanish — are not shipped rather than shipped wrong. ### Locale `/etc/locale.conf`, read by `/etc/profile` and `/etc/zsh/zshenv`, default `LANG=C.UTF-8`. **Only the charset half of it is real.** musl decodes and encodes UTF-8 whatever the locale says and ships no locale data, so collation stays codepoint order and messages stay English whichever language is named. What `LANG` does is tell the programs that ask that the terminal is UTF-8 — an unset `LANG` reads as "ASCII only", and that is what makes a program fall back to `?`. ### The chord is a setting, and that is the point **There is no combination that is free for everyone on every host**, and a guest cannot find out what its host takes: a key the host swallowed is indistinguishable from a key nobody pressed. Three parties have a claim on every candidate. | | | |---|---| | **The host takes it, and the guest never sees it** | | | `Alt+F4`, `Alt+F2` | window manager | | `Ctrl+Alt+F1..F6` | display manager — and it matches **loosely**, so adding Shift does not get past it | | `Ctrl+Alt+`digit | QEMU's own console tabs | | **Applications want it, and lose it permanently if the kernel eats it** | | | `Alt+`anything | Meta. zsh binds Meta-digit as `digit-argument`; so does every readline editor | | `Ctrl+`letter | control characters | | `Ctrl+Shift+`digit | types a character — `Ctrl+Shift+2` is `^@` | | `F1..F6` alone | help, and whatever a full-screen program wants | | **The keyboard layout wants it** | | | `AltGr+`letter | Polish diacritics — ą ć ę ł ń ó ś ź ż — and on some setups AltGr arrives as Ctrl+Alt | So the kernel ships a default and lets it be moved: ```sh chvt # report the active terminal and the current chord chvt -c altgr+F # AltGr+F1..F6 (the default) chvt -c ctrl+shift+F # Ctrl+Shift+F1..F6 chvt -c alt+1 # Alt+1..6 chvt -c off # no chord; chvt N is then the only way ``` `off` is a legitimate setting, not a failure mode. On a machine whose host grabs everything worth binding, `chvt N` from a shell is the honest answer. The default is **AltGr+F1..F6**, and the `AltGr+`letter row above needs reading carefully: what a Polish layout wants is AltGr with a **letter**. AltGr with a **function key** produces nothing on any layout, no window manager binds it, and no application asks for it. It is the one combination all three parties leave alone. That distinction is only expressible because Right Alt is tracked as its own modifier bit. It used to share `ALT`, which is harmless for typing — neither is used to look up a character — and made this impossible to say. Verified rather than argued: with the default set, `AltGr+F2` switches, `AltGr+F1` returns to a pixel-identical tty1, and `AltGr+a` still reaches the shell, so ą is untouched. Whatever the modifiers are, they also bind **minus** and **equals** to the previous and next terminal. Those step only through terminals that are *in use* — the same `opened` count `VT_GETSTATE` reports — because six terminals with two shells on them means four blank screens in between, and cycling past them is worse than not having the key. Which chords reach a guest at all was **measured, not assumed**: a temporary probe in `kbdgetc` logged every modified keypress, and QEMU's `sendkey` fired each candidate at it. Everything arrived, `Ctrl+Alt+F2` included — so that conflict is the host's display manager, not QEMU, and no amount of extra modifiers gets around a grab that matches loosely. The modifier test is an **equality**, not a mask: ```c if (vt_chord_mods != 0 && (shift & (CTL | SHIFT | ALT | RALT)) == vt_chord_mods && ...) ``` A mask fires on any superset, so a chord aimed at the host would switch terminals behind your back. Right Alt is tracked as its own bit (`RALT`) for the same reason; it used to share `ALT`, which is harmless for typing — neither is used to look up a character — and wrong for chords. `include/posix.h`'s `VTC_*` bits mirror `include/kbd.h`'s modifier bits, and a `_Static_assert` in `kbd.c` holds them together. A mismatch would be silent: a chord set from userspace would simply never match, and the only symptom would be a key that does nothing. ### Taking the chord back Three layers, in increasing order of how much a program is claiming: | | | |---|---| | **`VT_SETMODE(VT_PROCESS)`** | the terminal's owner handles switching itself. The kernel stops acting on the chord entirely. This is what a display server uses. | | **`EVIOCGRAB` on `/dev/input/event0`** | an exclusive keyboard grab. Checked in `kbdgetc` *before* the chord is even recognised, so a grabbing program receives every scancode including this one. | | nothing | the kernel switches, which is the default and right for a plain terminal | `VT_SETMODE` used to be accepted and ignored — a program could ask for the chord, be told yes, and still not get it. It works now. What `VT_PROCESS` does **not** do yet is the release handshake: Linux signals the owning process on every switch request and blocks until it answers `VT_RELDISP`, which is how a display server releases the GPU before the screen changes hands. Nothing here has anything to release, so the kernel simply stops switching rather than negotiating. `struct vt_mode` already carries `relsig`/`acqsig` for when Schcom needs it. Input goes to whichever terminal is on screen. That is what makes a terminal a terminal: the keyboard follows the eyes. ## Two rules that are easy to get wrong **The grid is the only source of truth for the size.** `TIOCGWINSZ` reports `v->cols`/`v->rows`, not a fresh `gfx_cols()`/`gfx_rows()`. When it computed its own answer there were two, and they disagreed: the grids are sized at `vt_init()`, which runs before the display driver is found on the PCI bus, so they were 80x24 while `TIOCGWINSZ` said 160x50. Text stopped two thirds of the way down the screen, `ls` formatted for a width the grid did not have and split words across the wrap, and zsh's cursor tracking was wrong on every line -- three symptoms, one disagreement. `vt_resize()` now corrects the grids when a scanout arrives, and the ioctl reads them. **A glyph in the last column does not wrap.** It sets `wrap_pending`, and the wrap happens when the *next* glyph arrives. Every real terminal behaves this way and none of them document it clearly. Wrapping immediately makes a line exactly as wide as the screen take two rows instead of one, and makes it impossible to write the bottom-right cell without scrolling -- and zsh's partial-line marker depends on the rule directly: it writes exactly `COLUMNS - 1` spaces and expects the cursor to still be on that line. With immediate wrap, a reverse-video `#` appeared above every prompt. Anything that moves the cursor deliberately -- CR, LF, backspace, an escape sequence -- clears the debt. ## Ctrl-C used to kill the shell Worth its own note, because the cause was one character and the effect was a machine you could not use. When Ctrl-C arrives, `consoleread()` discards the partial line and breaks off the read in progress. It returned **`-1`** to do so — and `-1` is `-EPERM`. So a program that handles `SIGINT` by carrying on saw a permanent error instead of an interrupted call, and exited: ``` zsh: error on TTY read: operation not permitted schinitd: restarting os.schos.console-shell ``` and then the next Ctrl-C did the same thing to the replacement. A shell that cannot survive Ctrl-C is a shell nobody can use, and the supervisor faithfully restarting it made it a loop. It returns **`EINTR`** now, which is what a signal-interrupted read is required to give: the whole convention — retry, or return to the caller — is built on receiving that and not something else. ## Editing a line you have already typed Two bugs, both in the same half-second of using a shell, and both worth recording because the symptom pointed away from the cause. **Arrow keys corrupted the next two keystrokes.** They arrive from the keyboard as single keycodes and were pushed into the input buffer exactly like that. No terminal has ever worked that way. `consoleintr()` translates them to the DEC/xterm sequences now -- `ESC[A`, `ESC[D`, `ESC[5~` and the rest -- which is what every terminfo entry and every line editor already expects. The *value* those keycodes had was a second bug wearing the same coat, and it outlived the fix: `KEY_UP` was `0xE2`, a UTF-8 lead byte, so a character typed from the other direction was eaten just as thoroughly. See the keycode rule above. **Then the end of the line vanished as you typed into it.** With the arrows working, editing mid-line left the buffer perfectly correct and the screen wrong, which is a maddening pair. The cause is one line in `vt_putc()`: backspace *erased the cell it moved onto*. That is what a line-discipline erase does. It is not what the BS control character does — a program that wants to rub a character out sends `\b \b`, backspace, space, backspace, and the separation matters because programs also use plain `\b` simply to go back. zsh does, on every mid-line edit: ``` echo alpha \b\b zha \b\b ``` Move back two, rewrite the tail, move back two again to leave the cursor where the user expects it. Against a destructive backspace that last pair deleted the `ha` it had just drawn. `\b` moves and nothing else now; `0x7f` is ignored, as it is on a real terminal; and `consputc()` spells its own erase out as `\b \b`, exactly as it already did for the serial line. `ESC[@`, `ESC[P` and `ESC[X` — insert, delete and erase characters — were added at the same time, because `TERM=linux` declares them and a terminal that drops them silently is the same class of bug waiting for a different editor. ## What it does not do - **No scrollback.** The grid is exactly the visible screen. Shift+PageUp does nothing because there is nothing above the top row to show. - **No reflow on resize.** The geometry is read once at `vt_init()`. Nothing resizes a framebuffer console today; a compositor will, and that is when this has to grow. - **No `VT_RELDISP` handshake.** `VT_PROCESS` stops the kernel switching, but the kernel does not signal the owning process and wait for an answer. A display server that needs to release the GPU *before* the screen changes hands will need that, and `struct vt_mode` already has the fields. - **No terminal past 6.** Linux allows 63. Six is what the chords reach and what the grids are sized for. - **Only 240x75 of any screen.** Larger framebuffers work; the grid is clamped and the remainder stays background. Raising `VT_MAXCOLS`/`VT_MAXROWS` is the fix, and costs BSS. - **No UTF-8 the font lacks.** The console draws through the TrueType rasteriser now, so the limit is the font's `cmap` rather than a 256-entry table — Latin, Latin Extended, Greek, Cyrillic and the common punctuation and maths symbols all render. Anything genuinely absent still draws as `?`, which is deliberate: drawing a *different* character would be worse. - **No shaping, and no wide characters.** One codepoint is one cell of one advance. Combining marks land on top of their own cell rather than the preceding one, and CJK draws at half the width it wants. Both need a width table and a cell that can span two columns. - **No dead keys**, so French and Spanish layouts are absent rather than broken. See above. - **No per-terminal layout.** One keyboard, one layout. Switching to tty3 does not move anybody's fingers. - **Only three layouts.** Adding one is a table in `keymap.c` and a line in the catalogue; the mechanism is not the limit, the typing is.