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

[Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek]

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.

Zbyszek