Arch Linux

mfsal

Member

From: Arizona

Registered: 2008-07-21

Posts: 14

[SOLVED] black hole between vc/6 and vc/1

It's been awhile, and I'm not really sure which forum to put this in, so this works for me...

It's been awhile since I've used Linux, but I don't remember Arch or any other distribution doing this.  Basically, when I alt-arrow to the right past vc/6 or to the left past vc/1 I get this great big nothing.  I've dug through the forums and google.com/linux, but I'm not seeing anything like this anywhere else.

Does anyone else get this behavior?  Any clues how to fix it?  It should loop back to the other end, right?

The live cd does the same, by the way.

SOLVED:

add '/usr/bin/deallocvt' to rc.local

could this be added to rc.sysinit in the future?

Last edited by mfsal (2008-07-22 04:44:48)

elliott

Member

Registered: 2006-03-07

Posts: 296

Re: [SOLVED] black hole between vc/6 and vc/1

As far back as I can remember, this is how it has always worked.

mfsal

Member

From: Arizona

Registered: 2008-07-21

Posts: 14

Re: [SOLVED] black hole between vc/6 and vc/1

Maybe I'm just going crazy, but I could have sworn I'd seen it behave otherwise.  In fact, I thought it did so earlier today while I was installing Debian to check something.  But then, that was in syslinux, without a GUI.  Maybe it happens when you assign vc/7 to X...

Eh, I'm tired, I'll play more tomorrow.

mfsal

Member

From: Arizona

Registered: 2008-07-21

Posts: 14

Re: [SOLVED] black hole between vc/6 and vc/1

fixed it, original message edited with the fix

smurnjiff

Member

Registered: 2007-06-25

Posts: 210

Re: [SOLVED] black hole between vc/6 and vc/1

Thanks for the tip.

dav7

Member

From: Australia

Registered: 2008-02-08

Posts: 674

Re: [SOLVED] black hole between vc/6 and vc/1

FYI...

Linux creates 63 new virtual terminals when it boots (for serial logins - archaic UNIX standards FTL), so the "big black nothing" is 63-7, or 56 empty consoles. If you arrowed past them enough times (holding down the arrow key works ) you'll eventually swing round to vc/1 again.

When you run X, it deallocates all the unused terminals (those that aren't being managed by eg agetty) except the one it's about to make use of, and when you exit X, you get <consoles_before_X_started_except_unmanaged_ones>+1, or in your case/the default case, 7 available consoles, so if you arrow past vc/6 or vc/1 after running X, you'll only get a single blank, unused terminal.

Complex, I know. I spent a fortnight or so without X (blacklisting intel_agp ftw! YEA RIGHT) so I did a bit of learning =P

A full solution to this issue would be to modify rc.sysinit and startx to run deallocvt when the system is booting and X has quit, respectively, or submit a patch to the kernel as well as X to do so automatically (the best solution IMHO). The chances of the kernel liking a patch like that would be minimal, if an option to disable this behavior wasn't provided in the kernel config, and even then... you never know. When a login manager like agetty references a virtual console that doesn't exist, it's created automatically however, so yeah.

Just thought people might like the info

-dav7

Last edited by dav7 (2008-07-22 05:55:51)

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