Re: [RFC] Multi-terminal support (Re: [PATCH] terminal split)

[Robert Millan <rmh@aybabtu.com>]

On Sat, Nov 22, 2008 at 06:42:54PM +0100, Yoshinori K. Okuji wrote:
> 
> However, whenever you want to do more than that, you must control each 
> terminal differently. In particular, the menu code. The menu interface may 
> not be uniform with all terminals. A terminal might have the size 80x25. 
> Another might have 120x40. This is more complex with graphical terminals.

This problem does only happen with output terminals, right?  My primary
concern are input terminals, because if we want to support USB keyboards
we need to probe from both USB and AT ones at the same time.

> I like the idea that GRUB displays the user interface simultaneously. But this 
> requires a lot of refactoring. Probably, the menu code will have to iterate 
> all terminals explicitly, and make actions differently for each terminal, 
> based on the capabilities. With the menu editor, how should the cursor be 
> managed? We need to think a lot.

I've been thinking... what if we make this generic?  I.e. with an event loop,
then terminals can register their poll functions to it, and write their stuff
to a shared resource the rest of GRUB can read from.

-- 
Robert Millan

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