[Testers wanted] /dev/console cleanups

[Carlos A. M. dos Santos]

On Sun, Oct 26, 2008 at 1:27 PM, Ed Schouten <ed at 80386.nl> wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> Most of you probably already know that I've been very busy improving our
> kernel's TTY implementation. I've committed the new MPSAFE TTY layer
> back in August. So far most of the things seem to work properly as far
> as I can see. There are always some small bugs, but I'm confident we'll
> get them fixed before 8.0.
>
> One of the things that I dislike about the code we have right now, is
> the way /dev/console is implemented. There is a small amount of
> complexity there, which is mainly because of the fact that our console
> code actually works on two different levels:
>
> - We've got kernel messages that are printed using very low-level
>  routines and communicate directly with the drivers.
>
> - We've got user messages that are printed through /dev/console, which
>  actually work on the TTY level, but make use of a similar device
>  selection as the first set of routines.
>
> In an attempt to make /dev/console MPSAFE, I moved /dev/console into the
> TTY layer itself, which makes it a lot more simple than it is now.
>
> Well, to keep a long story short, it would be wonderful if some people
> could test the latest MPSAFE TTY patchset, just to make sure it doesn't
> wreck people's setups after I commit this. So just apply the patch and
> see if you can still boot your system, go into single user and multi
> user mode, use conscontrol(8), etc.
>
> I've stored the latest MPSAFE TTY patchsets at the usual location. Make
> sure you download the latest version.
>
>        http://people.FreeBSD.org/~ed/mpsafetty/
>
> The patchset also includes some other nice things, like some manual
> pages (not finished) and a port of snp(4) to the new TTY layer (also not
> finished).
>
> Thank you for your attention!

The patched source builds and installs flawlessy. However I observed
something that seems to be a regression. If I run either xconsole or
xterm -C I only see kernel messages, even though my X startup (via
XDM) changes the owner of /dev/console to the logged-in user. I mean,
if I do some timg like "echo OK > /dev/console", the message is echoed
on /dev/ttyv0, not by xconsole

This is the same problem reported by Jeff Blank on RELENG_7:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2008-September/044949.html
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2008-October/045885.html

-- 
cd /usr/ports/sysutils/life
make clean