Re: [PATCH] console: Add persistent scrollback buffers for all VGA consoles

Hi Geert,

On Fr, 2014-05-30 at 16:28 +0200, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:
Hi Manuel,

On Fri, May 30, 2014 at 3:27 PM, Manuel Schölling
[off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Add a scrollback buffers for each VGA console. The benefit is that
the scrollback history is not flushed when switching between

consoles

quoted

but is persistent.
The buffers are allocated on demand when a new console is opened.

Thanks for your patch!

I see two issues with this feature:
  1. Before, the single (default 64 KiB) buffer was allocated at

startup.

     Now you will allocate a buffer each time a new console is opened.
     Depending on memory fragmentation, this may fail.

Indeed, if allocation fails, scrollbuffer[vc_num]->data will stay NULL
and scrolling will be disabled for that console. Is that ok or would you
prefer another behavior of the kernel?

 2. People with RAM-constrained systems may not like this.
     Can it be a config option?

Sure, I will add an option for that.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

                        Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 --

geert@linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a

hacker. But

when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something

like that.

                                -- Linus Torvalds