[systemd-devel] [RFC] VTs for multiple seats

[Alex Deucher]

On Wed, Jul 4, 2012 at 2:13 PM, David Herrmann
<dh.herrmann at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Hi guys
>
> (CC'ing systemd-ML as they proved to be very helpful and interested in this ;))
>
> I am currently working on kmscon and am planning on writing some
> user-space VT logic similar to CONFIG_VT in the kernel. The idea is to
> have multiple virtual terminals for each seat. systemd-logind
> currently associates the kernel VTs tty1-ttyX to seat0 only and all
> other seats are not multi-session capable. Moreover, there is no easy
> and simple way to make the kernel VTs multi-seat capable. Therefore,
> we need another approach.
>
> I was talking to Lennart about this and there is definitely a need to
> fix this. However, I have multiple ideas for that and I was wondering
> whether you want to comment on this, too, as I saw that one of your
> initial proposals for wayland was to have a system wide compositor
> which handles all video input and as such would always be active on a
> seat (see proposal 3. below).

There's also Dave's render node work which has been picked up by Ilija:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2012-April/021326.html
The basic idea is that you can allocate display resources to separate
drm device nodes and then run separate userspace stacks on top of each
one or submit rendering/compute commands to a render-only node.

Alex