The situation you outline (where the console driver basically
multiplexes the various devices), is precisely the architecture that
MADO uses/will use. To open a window in MADO, one would run a small
program which would set up the namespace to look exactly like the
namespace without MADO. This way, a client opening /dev/bitblt would
see a graphics deisplay interface exactly like the real thing, and
would work with or without MADO. The same thing applies to
/dev/console, dev/kbd, and /dev/mouse etc.
The original idea for this is from 8 1/2.
It is sometimes necessary to rewrite some messages (expecially ones
going to/from bitblt), which can incur some overhead.
Received on Mon Dec 12 04:21:08 1994
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