On Wednesday 04 June 2008 12:42:06 Bill Gatliff wrote: > Rob Landley wrote: > > On Tuesday 03 June 2008 21:56:48 Paul Mundt wrote: > >> On Tue, Jun 03, 2008 at 03:37:23PM -0700, H. Peter Anvin wrote: > >>> Rob Landley wrote: > >>>>> Actually, lots have frame buffers these days. > >>>> > >>>> Cell phones, for instance. > >>> > >>> Sure, but do you want to use them as consoles? > >> > >> Unless your name is Pavel, no one actually wants a console on their > >> phone. So no, just framebuffers, as is to be expected :-) > > > > Actually if you ever need to diagnose early boot stuff on _any_ platform, > > you do need a console. But it can be serial or netconsole, as long as > > that works... > > ... who says I _always_ want it to look and feel like a "cell phone"? With the little bluetooth earpieces, cellphone "look and feel" is decidedly mutable these days. (Ok, cell phones started out with the star-tac flip open phone, a fairly obvious rip-off from Star Trek TOS. We now have the banana in Uhura's ear, running off of bluetooth. Now I'm waiting for the communicator badges. It's only a matter of time...) That said, the cell phone and PDA spaces are converging, and thingies like the iPhone and Nokia 810 are the next logical step beyond laptops. (If you want to hook them up to a big screen and keyboard, your "docking station" can just be USB. If it wasn't for the need to provide power to the suckers, it could be bluetooth.) You only need to carry around one pack of electronics with you, and everybody has a cell phone these days. The rest is a question of user interface and letting Moore's Law crank long enough... Rob P.S. I agree with what Peter seems to be saying, that the old "vga console" code is a side issue. /dev/console doesn't even provide a controlling tty, and the PTY code shouldn't really have anything in commonwith the old virtual console stuff except an API. (Honestly it just attaches a cursor position, screen size, and some signals to a pipe. The rest of the stuff it does like setting serial port hardware rates and beeping the speaker probably should have been done via ioctl on /dev nodes or something.) -- "One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code." - Ken Thompson. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-embedded" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
