Re: Default Xen PVM console?

On Sun, 24 May 2009, Ed Schouten wrote:

> * Adrian Chadd <adrian_at_freebsd.org> wrote:
>> * Modify the xenconsole driver to attach to ttyv0 (via a kernel environment 
>> variable) so /etc/ttys doesn't need modifying (but this may confuse tools 
>> that assumes /dev/ttyvX == syscons.)
>
> Please don't. Someone on IRC told me Xen also has some framebuffer feature. 
> Say, someone would port syscons to Xen, the naming would conflict with the 
> console device node. /dev/xc0 is good enough. I even think it should have 
> been called ttyx0, not xc0.

Given that there will be increasing levels of support for "pass-through" 
hardware access in virtual machine environments and a trend in the direction 
of virtualization-friendly hardware, we shouldn't preclude the possibility of 
something a lot closer to syscons working inside of Xen in the future.  This 
means we should leave the syscons device names open so that syscons can claim 
them if desired.

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge