CONSOLE(4)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 cur‐
sor. 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, charac‐
ter and background colours for a colour card, or intensity/under‐
line/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 graph‐
ics mode of the Hercules is of no use to MINIX 3. EGA and VGA are also
mostly seen as the same in text mode. An EGA adapter is either a mono‐
chrome 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 mem‐
ory: "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 con‐
sole 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 charac‐
ter must be displayed. The screen is scrolled up if needed to start a
new line. Some characters have special effects when sent to the con‐
sole. Some even have arguments in the form of comma separated decimal
numbers. These numbers default to the lowest possible value when omit‐
ted. The top-left character is at position (1, 1). The following con‐
trol 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, wrap‐
ping 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 (high intensity fg colour)
n = 4: Underline (mono) / Cyan (colour)
n = 5: Blinking
n = 7: Reverse Video
n = 30: Black foreground colour
n = 31: Red
n = 32: Green
n = 33: Brown
n = 34: Blue
n = 35: Magenta
n = 36: Cyan
n = 37: Light Gray
n = 39: Default fg colour (lt gray)
n = 40-47: Same for background colour
n = 49: Default bg colour (black)
Note: The "bold" versions of black,
brown and lt gray become dark gray, yel‐
low and white.
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 char‐
acter 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. How many lines are used depends on the current video
mode. The 80x25 video mode used by MINIX 3 has an 8x16 character cell,
80x28 has 8x14 characters, and 132x43 or 132x50 has 8x8 characters.
The boot variable console is used by both the Boot Monitor and the con‐
sole driver to set the video mode, software scrolling on/off, and VGA
screen blank timeout. See boot(8).
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 con‐
sole device unless they map to special hotkeys. The hotkeys are as
follows:
Name KeyFunction
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 dis‐
aster 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 ALSOtty(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)
CONSOLE(4)
