SchOS/etc/schinit
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Nexoniarz 1c1b0c9570 tty: six virtual terminals, and the plumbing that makes them terminals
/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
2026-09-13 00:08:00 +02:00
..
console-shell.job tty: six virtual terminals, and the plumbing that makes them terminals 2026-09-13 00:08:00 +02:00
README schinit: a launchd-shaped process 1 2026-08-09 16:36:13 +02:00
tty2-shell.job tty: six virtual terminals, and the plumbing that makes them terminals 2026-09-13 00:08:00 +02:00

Job manifests for schinit, SchOS process 1.

Every *.job file in this directory is loaded at boot. Format is sectioned
key = value; # starts a comment, keys are case-insensitive.

  Label             a reverse-DNS name, as launchd uses. Identity, not a path.
  Program           the binary to execute
  Args              argv, space separated. argv[0] is conventionally the
                    basename, so `Args = sh` for `/bin/sh`.
  RunAtLoad         start it when schinit loads
  KeepAlive         restart it when it exits
  Disabled          load it but do not start it
  ThrottleInterval  seconds between respawns (default 1)
  StandardIn        \
  StandardOut        > paths to open as fd 0, 1, 2
  StandardError     /

  [Socket <name>]
  Path              a unix socket schinit will hold on the job's behalf and
                    start the job on first connect

Socket sections are parsed but not yet acted on -- that is milestone 2, and
demand launching is the whole reason this is shaped after launchd rather than
sysvinit. The key exists now so manifests do not have to change later.

Unknown keys and unknown sections are ignored rather than fatal: a manifest
written for a newer schinit must not stop this one booting the machine.