[systemd-devel] [PATCH 2/2] vconsole: set font on tty16..tty63 as well

[David Herrmann]

Hi

On Fri, Feb 27, 2015 at 4:09 AM, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek
<zbyszek at in.waw.pl> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 01:37:25PM +0100, Jan Engelhardt wrote:
>>
>> On Wednesday 2015-02-25 21:10, Lennart Poettering wrote:
>> >> >> The setup program would not set the font on tty16 upwards.
>> >> >> There is a maximum of 63 VCs possible in Linux. (That number is
>> >> >> hardcoded.)
>> >> >
>> >> >We deliberately do not support such high VTs in systemds.
>> >>
>> >> And what's the rationale?
>> >
>> >Initially it was that we had the "systemd" udev tag on all VCs, which
>> >made them appear as .device units in systemd, and I really didn't want
>> >63 of them. Then, some of the VC ioctls have a 16bit bitmap, which
>> >makes the higher VCs not as accesible.
>> >What's your usecase for this?
>>
>> No particular usecase. I just stumbled across this arbitrary number
>> 15/16 in the source code while I was figuring out the font reload
>> mess. The patches sent,
>>       vconsole: rerun setup on console takeovers as well
>>       vconsole: match on vtcon events, not fbcon ones,
>> are still very much desired to have included.
> One reason I see is automated tools which want to open many consoles
> (for debug output or whatever), without stepping on the toes of the
> user. They might start with tty20 or something.
>
> If the trick with checking for /dev/vcsXX works, I don't see why
> we shouldn't support the full set provided by the kernel. One magic
> number less is always good.

It does not work. vcs are available if the VT is allocated, but
v_state returns information whether someone actually has the VT
_opened_.

Thanks
David