I'm not a programmer and I have no idea if this would help us at all, but with the new console driver described below, would it be possible to develop something similar to Speakup on the FreeBSD kernel? Dear FreeBSD Community, The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce another funded project! Ed Schouten has been awarded a grant to write a new console driver for the FreeBSD project. We are excited to support Ed in providing a more efficient and user friendly console driver. This project will allow Ed to add an additional abstraction layer to the kernel. This new layer, the terminal layer will be a layer that sits between the TTY layer, the kernel console (cngetc, cnputc) and the actual console driver. Right now we have a terminal emulator (libteken) that is part of Syscons. This terminal emulator will be moved into this terminal layer. The advantage of having such a layer, is that the console driver itself does not have to care about any TTY semantics, streams of bytes, processing escape sequences, etc. It will just receive a set of character drawing, filling and copying actions. This should also make it easier to implement Unicode. "During this project I'm going to continue the work I did with the TTY layer, by developing a new console driver for the FreeBSD kernel," said Ed Schouten, FreeBSD Developer. "By moving towards a graphics mode console driver, it will be much easier to make the boot process look nice on desktop systems (i.e. PC-BSD). It will also make it possible to support the industry-standard Unicode character sets by default." This project will be completed by the end of December. Sincerely, The FreeBSD Foundation
