On Mon, 25 Sep 2000, OKUJI Yoshinori wrote: > > We also need to decide on the external kbd interface and make > > it official (somewhere in <mach/i386/kd.h> or so). Several programs > > are shipping their own version already. > > IMO, /dev/kdb should disappear. Having two devices to read a > keyboard is nonsense. Instead, /dev/console should support an > interface to read raw key codes. Once Mach just exports a bare console > device (instead of the current cooked device) to the user space, this > would be straightforward.
In some cases it might be good to be able to connect multiple keyboards, but not the same number of screens. It seems more modular to me to let the console use a keyboard device and a output device. As for an interface, I'd recommend you to take a look at the input part of gii (www.ggi-project.org). The keyboard events it generates are very reasonable and portable. I have thought a bit about the microkernel idea. When I read about microkernels (such as L4), it seemed the idea is to have drivers in userspace, not in kernelspace. However, there seem to be a lot of drivers in Mach (IDE, NIC, ...). Wouldn't it give a more modular and more robust design if these drivers were moved into translators like the file systems have been. Is there any disadvantages that I don't see? -- Niklas