Re: [OpenBIOS] RFC: Rework of OpenBIOS terminal/console

[Mark Cave-Ayland]

On 09/03/13 12:57, Blue Swirl wrote:
> I did some work on the control sequence handling in 2007 and 2009
> based on what Debian 3.1 and NetBSD 4.0 expect of the OpenBIOS
> console. Later versions of Debian and other distros use fbdev console
> which is independent of this.
>
> Based on a quick comparison, both Forth and C versions implement a lot
> of control characters.
>
> Only in Forth version (or real implementation instead of dummy):
> BEL, VT, Esc-E, Esc-L, Esc-m, Esc-P, Esc-p, Esc-q, Esc-s
>
> Esc-K seems to be simpler in Forth than C version, which has three
> separate modes. Similarly Esc-J handling does not seem to match.
>
> Only in C console:
> CAN, SUB
>
> But I have no objection, I can retest Debian 3.1 and NetBSD 4.0
> afterwards and try to fix or reimplement if something is missing since
> the differences seem to be minor.

Great! I've done some testing here, and I do have a proof-of-concept 
patchset which works well. The problem is that in order to maintain 
bisectability for each feature, the vast majority of commits end up 
having to back-out certain parts of previous commits in order to 
maintain a working binary until the switch occurs.

My plan is to break out the Forth terminal fixes into a separate 
patchset and commit them straight away, and then post a separate patch 
series that does the switch. Once this is in done, it should be possible 
to further tidy up the console/graphic initialisation by moving the 
low-level C console code from the various architectures into 
libopenbios/console_common.c to remove even more redundancy.

ATB,

Mark.