On RELENG_6 (and probably RELENG_7) we see our syscons windows and
pseudo-terminals have the following buffer sizes:
| LINE RAW CAN OUT IHIWT ILOWT OHWT LWT COL STATE SESS PGID DISC
| ttyv0 0 0 0 7680 6720 2052 256 7 OCcl 1146 1146 term
| ttyp0 0 0 0 7680 6720 1296 256 0 OCc 82033 82033 term
These buffer sizes make no sense, because we often have much more output
than input, but I guess having higher input buffer sizes improves
guarantees of the system.
On MPSAFE TTY I just sent both the input and output buffer sizes to 7
KB, which is pretty big on a standard FreeBSD install with 8 syscons
windows and some PTY's. Reduce the baud rate to 9600 baud, which means
we now have the following buffer sizes:
| LINE INQ CAN LIN LOW OUTQ USE LOW COL SESS PGID STATE
| ttyv0 1920 0 0 192 1984 0 199 7 2401 2401 Oil
| pts/0 1920 0 0 192 1984 0 199 5631 1305 2526 Oi
This is a lot smaller, but for pseudo-devices this should be good
enough. You need to do a lot of punching to fill up a 7.5 KB input
buffer. If it turns out things don't work out this way, we'll just
switch to 19200 baud.
The last half year I've been working on a replacement TTY layer for the
FreeBSD kernel. The new TTY layer was designed to improve the following:
- Improved driver model:
The old TTY layer has a driver model that is not abstract enough to
make it friendly to use. A good example is the output path, where the
device drivers directly access the output buffers. This means that an
in-kernel PPP implementation must always convert network buffers into
TTY buffers.
If a PPP implementation would be built on top of the new TTY layer
(still needs a hooks layer, though), it would allow the PPP
implementation to directly hand the data to the TTY driver.
- Improved hotplugging:
With the old TTY layer, it isn't entirely safe to destroy TTY's from
the system. This implementation has a two-step destructing design,
where the driver first abandons the TTY. After all threads have left
the TTY, the TTY layer calls a routine in the driver, which can be
used to free resources (unit numbers, etc).
The pts(4) driver also implements this feature, which means
posix_openpt() will now return PTY's that are created on the fly.
- Improved performance:
One of the major improvements is the per-TTY mutex, which is expected
to improve scalability when compared to the old Giant locking.
Another change is the unbuffered copying to userspace, which is both
used on TTY device nodes and PTY masters.
Upgrading should be quite straightforward. Unlike previous versions,
existing kernel configuration files do not need to be changed, except
when they reference device drivers that are listed in UPDATING.
Obtained from: //depot/projects/mpsafetty/...
Approved by: philip (ex-mentor)
Discussed: on the lists, at BSDCan, at the DevSummit
Sponsored by: Snow B.V., the Netherlands
dcons(4) fixed by: kan
The CTRL() macro seems to perform character to control-character
conversion (i.e. 'A' to 0x01) to lowercase characters. This is actually
not valid. If we use lowercase characters, conversions such as
CTRL('\\') and CTRL('?') will result to invalid conversions.
Because we must still support old source code that uses CTRL() (bad!),
we make CTRL() accept both forms. When the character is a lowercase
character, we perform the old style conversion.
Approved by: philip (mentor)
This will make a number of things easier in the future, as well as (finally!)
avoiding the Id-smashing problem which has plagued developers for so long.
Boy, I'm glad we're not using sup anymore. This update would have been
insane otherwise.
both define ttydefchars[] as globals. This was fixed in 1.1.5
by making ttydefchars[] static like it should always have been.
Submitted by: Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>
systems with it on by default (or the equivalent flag) and terminal control
sequences confuse it greatly. (Try running `ls' under bash in an XTerm,
for instance.)