K 10
svn:author
V 2
ed
K 8
svn:date
V 27
2009-11-13T05:54:55.703209Z
K 7
svn:log
V 1208
Switch the default terminal emulation style to xterm for most platforms.

Right now syscons(4) uses a cons25-style terminal emulator. The
disadvantages of that are:

- Little compatibility with embedded devices with serial interfaces.
- Bad bandwidth efficiency, mainly because of the lack of scrolling
  regions.
- A very hard transition path to support for modern character sets like
  UTF-8.

Our terminal emulation library, libteken, has been supporting
xterm-style terminal emulation for months, so flip the switch and make
everyone use an xterm-style console driver.

I still have to enable this on i386. Right now pc98 and i386 share the
same /etc/ttys file. I'm not going to switch pc98, because it uses its
own Kanji-capable cons25 emulator.

IMPORTANT: What to do if things go wrong (i.e. graphical artifacts):

- Run the application inside script(1), try to reduce the problem and
  send me the log file.
- In the mean time, you can run `vidcontrol -T cons25' and `export
  TERM=cons25' so you can run applications the same way you did before.
  You can also build your kernel with `options TEKEN_CONS25' to make all
  virtual terminals use the cons25 emulator by default.

Discussed on:	current@

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