Kmscon Project Seeks To Replace Linux Virtual Terminal

An anonymous reader writes "Phoronix reports on the progress of kmscon, David Herrmann's virtual console project that aims to supersede the Linux kernel's virtual terminal. kmscon takes advantage of modern Linux features such as kernel mode setting, direct rendering, and udev to provide hardware-accelerated rendering, full internationalization, monitor hot-plugging, and proper multi-seat support. A recent blog post by Herrmann addresses some of his frequently heard questions and criticisms about the kmscon project."

Comments

Re:Attention Distros

[Nimey]

Have you ever used 80x24 on a 22" monitor with 1680x1050 native res? The letters are so huge as to be unreadable. Ubuntu et al handle it correctly by letting the X driver do KMS to the native res, which carries over to the console.

I'd be happy with defaulting to whatever the video hardware can handle and then having an easy way to configure it for other resolutions.

Re:is any of this needed?

[broken_chaos]

Framebuffer consoles are (or were), in some cases, surprisingly slow. Huge amounts of output at least used to overwhelm them, only catching up if you swapped back and forth between VTs -- this didn't happen in non-framebuffer consoles or in terminal emulators in X.

I think it has improved significantly over the past few years, but that's probably partly from already working some hardware-accelerated rendering into some of the framebuffer console drivers. Though I'm not sure why they're not just working on improving the framebuffer drivers further -- the project seems to aim to put every damn piece into userspace, which seems like a terrible idea for something so essential as the basic console. If you break one of the things it depends on (such as xkb -- yes, really, a piece of X11 for a console system), then you lose any ability to interact with your system, or even view the boot output.

I'm really not sure who it's aimed at. If you break your install and you don't have an old kernel-based VT fallback, you're screwed. If you don't break it and it works fine, what benefit is it? You'll more than likely just be starting up X11 momentarily anyway.

Re:is any of this needed?

[TheCarp]

Totally unrelated... except to show how relative a term "slow" can be.

This reminds me of reading the docs for a Perl DNS module once when I was writting an internal app that needed to do a lot of DNS lookups. The docs said it was "pure perl" and "slow". So, if the docs said it was slow....I figured I would use the system resolver instead.

I wrote my app, came to test it.... and DOSd my own system as my program began trying to slam the system resolver with 6 parallel workers (batch resolving IPs based on logs)...each of which had to open several files (nsswitch.conf, hosts, hosts.allow, resolv.conf.....and I think a few others if memory servers) for EACH LOOKUP.... my poor system was no match for it (this was back in the single core days)

I switched to the "slow" dns module, and maybe it was slow by some standards, but compared to the system resolver...it was lightweight and fast.

"Slow" is always a relative term.