SchOS/docs/architecture/terminals.md

Virtual terminals

Six of them, /dev/tty1 through /dev/tty6, reached with Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F1 .. F6 or with chvt N. 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.

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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

Four bytes:

ch	the glyph the font draws — not a codepoint
fg, bg	palette indices, 0-15 ANSI plus two theme defaults
attr	reverse video; room for underline and the rest

ch stores the glyph rather than the codepoint because the console maps UTF-8 to CP437 before it gets here, and that is what include/font.h contains. Storing the codepoint would mean re-running the mapping on every repaint and getting a different answer for anything the font cannot draw.

The colours are indices rather than RGB because a cell holding two 32-bit colours would be twelve bytes instead of four, and the grids are static: six terminals at 240x75 is 432 KB of BSS, paid once at link time rather than failed to pay at run time. There is no contiguous multi-page allocator to ask.

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

The keyboard

kbd.c recognises Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F1..F6 and returns KEY_VT_SWITCH + n, which is above 0xFF on purpose: every value that fits in a byte is already either a character or a UTF-8 continuation byte, and a chord that collided 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. The keyboard driver names it and stops.

Why this chord

Anything the kernel swallows is taken from every program that will ever run here, permanently. That is the whole difficulty, and it took two wrong answers to see it. The obvious candidates are all spoken for on one side or the other:

The host takes it
Alt+F4	the window manager closes the QEMU window
Alt+F2	GNOME and KDE open a run dialog
Ctrl+Alt+F1..F6	the display manager switches its own terminals
Applications want it
Alt+anything	Meta. zsh's own line editor 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 layout wants it
AltGr+letter	Polish diacritics — ą ć ę ł ń ó ś ź ż — and on some setups AltGr is Ctrl+Alt

Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F1..F6 is in none of those sets. Display managers bind the same chord without Shift, so adding it steps out of the host's way, and no terminal application binds a triple-modified function key. Four keys is more than one wants to press, which is right for something done rarely and on purpose — chvt N covers everything else.

Which chords actually reach a guest was measured, not assumed: a temporary probe in kbdgetc logged every modified keypress, and QEMU's sendkey fired each candidate at it. Everything reached the guest, including Ctrl+Alt+F2 — so the host conflict is the host's display manager, not QEMU.

The modifier test is an equality, not a mask:

if ((shift & (CTL | SHIFT | ALT | RALT)) == (CTL | ALT | SHIFT) && ...)

A mask would fire 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.

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.

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. CP437 has ~256 glyphs. Anything else draws as ?, which is deliberate: drawing a different character would be worse.