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

[Manuel Schoelling <manuel.schoelling@gmx.de>]

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
> <manuel.schoelling@gmx.de> wrote:
> > Add a scrollback buffers for each VGA console. The benefit is that
> > the scrollback history is not flushed when switching between
consoles
> > 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
>