From: joel@wam.umd.edu (Joel M. Hoffman) Subject: Independend VC's (was Re: 0.97 patchlevel 5 available) Date: 17 Sep 1992 03:30:01 GMT
In article <3628@ra.nrl.navy.mil> eric@tantalus.dell.com (Eric Youngdale) writes:
>In article <1992Sep16.160457.20718@rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu> jliddle@rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu (Jean Liddle) writes:
>>As for the independent VC idea, I too, would add my voice to that. I
>>was impressed by a friends rs6000 as he toggled between VC's, one of
>>which was in text mode, and TWO of which were running two separate,
>>independent copies of X-Windows! (Actually, being able to flip out of
>>X to a text terminal would be handy).
>>
>> [...]
>
> I know that DELL SVr4 is capable of doing this, but the real limitation
>is how much memory you have on the video card. If you are using it all for X,
>then it is impossible (with the Dell system) to have any VC's. If you are
>using a lower resolution X display, then you can switch from X to the regular
>VC's. I think you are almost always limited to one X session.
>
I don't like the idea of using video memory for the VC's. It's messy.
Better is to use kernel space to store arbitrarily many video card
states. The time it takes to switch VC's may increase by as much as
many miliseconds, but I think it's worth it.... :-)
-Joel