CONSOLE(4)

NAME
console, keyboard, log - system console

DESCRIPTION
The TTY device driver manages two devices related to the main user interface, the system screen and the keyboard. These two together are named "the Console".

  The Screen
The screen of a PC can be managed by a Monochrome Display Adapter, a Hercules card, a Color Graphics Adapter, an Enhanced Graphics Adapter, or a Video Graphics Array. To the console driver these devices are seen as a block of video memory into which characters can be written to be displayed, an I/O register that sets the video memory origin to the character that is to be displayed on the top-left position of the screen, and an I/O register that sets the position of the hardware cursor. Each character within video memory is a two-byte word. The low byte is the character code, and the high byte is the "attribute byte", a set of bits that controls the way the character is displayed, character and background colours for a colour card, or intensity/underline/reverse video for monochrome.

These are the characteristics of the adapters in text mode:

    Adapter	Usable memory	Mono/Colour
    	MDA	4K	M
    	Hercules	4K	M
    	CGA	16K	C
    	EGA	32K	M or C
    	VGA	32K	M or C

MDA and Hercules are the same to the console driver, because the graphics mode of the Hercules is of no use to Minix. EGA and VGA are also mostly seen as the same in text mode. An EGA adapter is either a monochrome or a colour device depending on the screen attached to it. A VGA adapter can run in either monochrome or colour (grayscale) mode depending on how the Boot Monitor has initialized it.

The driver uses the video origin to avoid copying the screen contents when scrolling up or down. Instead, the origin is simply moved one line. This is named "hardware scrolling", as opposed to copying memory: "software scrolling".

The video origin is also used to implement several virtual consoles inside the video memory of the adapter. Each virtual console gets a segment of video memory. The driver chooses which console to display by moving the video origin. Note that an MDA or Hercules adapter can only support one console. CGA can support up to four 80x25 consoles, and EGA and VGA can have eight. It is best to configure one less console to leave some video memory free so that hardware scrolling has some space to work in.

Character codes are used as indices into a display font that is stored in the adapter. The default font is the IBM character set, which is an ASCII character set in the low 128 codes, and a number of mathematical, greek, silly graphics, and accented characters in the upper 128 codes. This font is fixed in the MDA, Hercules and CGA adapters, but can be replaced by a user selected font for the EGA and VGA adapters.

A number of control characters and escape sequences are implemented by the driver. The result is upward compatible with the ANSI standard terminal. The termcap(5) type is minix. Normal characters written to the console are displayed at the cursor position and the cursor is advanced one column to the right. If an entire line is filled then the cursor wraps to the first column of the next line when the next character must be displayed. The screen is scrolled up if needed to start a new line. Some characters have special effects when sent to the console. Some even have arguments in the form of comma separated decimal numbers. These numbers default to the lowest possible value when omitted. The top-left character is at position (1, 1). The following control characters and escape sequences are implemented by the console:

Sequence    Name    Function
^@    Null    Ignored (padding character)
^G    Bell    Produce a short tone from the speaker
^H    Backspace    Move the cursor back one column, wrapping from the
left edge up one line to the right edge
^I    Horizontal Tab    Move to the next tab stop, with each tab stop at
columns 1, 9, 25, etc. Wrap to the next line if necessary.
^J    Line Feed    Move one line down, scrolling the screen up if
necessary
^K    Vertical Tab    Same as LF
^L    Form Feed    Same as LF
^M    Carriage Return    Move to column 1
^[    Escape    Start of an escape sequence
^[M    Reverse Index    Move one line up, scrolling the screen down if
necessary
^[[nA    Cursor Up    Move the cursor up n lines
^[[nB    Cursor Down    Move the cursor down n lines
^[[nC    Cursor Forward    Move the cursor right n columns
^[[nD    Cursor Backward    Move the cursor left n columns
^[[m;nH    Cursor Position    Move the cursor to line m,
column n
^[[sJ    Erase in Display    Clear characters as follows:
s = 0: From cursor to end of screen
s = 1: From start of screen to cursor
s = 2: Entire screen
^[[sK    Erase in Line    Clear characters as follows:
s = 0: From cursor to end of line
s = 1: From start of line to cursor
s = 2: Entire line
^[[nL    Insert Lines    Insert n blank lines
^[[nM    Delete Lines    Delete n lines
^[[n@    Insert Characters    Insert n blank characters
^[[nP    Delete Characters    Delete n characters
^[[nm    Character Attribute    Set character attribute as follows:
n = 0: Normal (default) attribute
n = 1: Bold (mono) / Yellow (colour)
n = 4: Underline (M) / Light green (C)
n = 5: Blinking (M) / Magenta (C)
n = 7: Reverse Video
n = 30: Black foreground colour
n = 31: Red
n = 32: Green
n = 33: Orange
n = 34: Blue
n = 35: Magenta
n = 36: Light blue
n = 37: White
n = 40 - 47: Same for background colour

The console device implements the following ioctl to copy a font into font memory on EGA and VGA adapters:

    ioctl(fd, TIOCSFON, u8_t font[256][32]);

Font memory consists of 256 character definitions of 32 lines per character and 8 pixels per line. The first line is the topmost line of the character. The leftmost pixel is lit if the most significant bit of a line is set, etc. The 80x25 video mode used by Minix has an 8x16 character cell, which means that only the first 16 lines of a character are displayed.

  The Keyboard
The keyboard produces key codes for each key that is pressed. These keys are transformed into character codes or sequences according to the current keyboard translation table. The format of this table is described in keymap(5). The character codes can be read from the console device unless they map to special hotkeys. The hotkeys are as follows:

Name    Key    Function
CTRL-ALT-DEL    Send an abort signal to process 1 (init).  Init then
halts the system
CTRL-ALT-KP-.    Likewise for keypad period
F1    Process table dump
F2    Show memory map
F3    Toggle software/hardware scrolling
F5    Show network statistics
CTRL-F7    Send a quit signal to all processes connected to the console
CTRL-F8    Send an interrupt signal
CTRL-F9    Send a kill signal.  If CTRL-F8 or CTRL-F7 don't get 'em,
then this surely will. These keys are for disaster recovery. You would normally use DEL and CTRL-\ to send interrupt and quit signals.
ALT-F1    Select virtual console 0 (/dev/console)
ALT-F2    Select virtual console 1 (/dev/ttyc1)
ALT-F(n+1)    Select virtual console n
(/dev/ttycn)
ALT-Left    Select previous virtual console
ALT-Right    Select next virtual console

The keyboard map is set with the KIOCSMAP ioctl whose precise details are currently hidden in the loadkeys utility.

  Log device
The log device can be used by processes to print debug messages onto the console. The console is a terminal type device, so it is taken from processes when a session leader exits. This does not happen with the log device.

SEE ALSO
tty(4), loadkeys(1), keymap(5), boot(8).

NOTES
Output processing turns Line Feeds into CR LF sequences. Don't let this surprise you. Either turn off output processing or use one of the synonyms for LF.

AUTHOR
Kees J. Bot (kjb@cs.vu.nl)