[FreeBSD-Announce] Foundation Project Announcement

[Deb Goodkin]

Dear FreeBSD Community,

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce another funded project!

Ed Schouten has been awarded a grant to write a new console driver for
the FreeBSD project.  We are excited to support Ed in providing a more
efficient and user friendly console driver.

This project will allow Ed to add an additional abstraction layer to the
kernel. This new layer, the terminal layer will be a layer that sits
between the TTY layer, the kernel console (cngetc, cnputc) and the
actual console driver. Right now we have a terminal emulator (libteken)
that is part of Syscons. This terminal emulator will be moved into this
terminal layer.

The advantage of having such a layer, is that the console driver itself
does not have to care about any TTY semantics, streams of bytes,
processing escape sequences, etc. It will just receive a set of
character drawing, filling and copying actions. This should also make it
easier to implement Unicode.

"During this project I'm going to continue the work I did with the TTY
layer, by developing a new console driver for the FreeBSD kernel," said
Ed Schouten, FreeBSD Developer. "By moving towards a graphics mode
console driver, it will be much easier to make the boot process look
nice on desktop systems (i.e. PC-BSD). It will also make it possible to
support the industry-standard Unicode character sets by default."

This project will be completed by the end of December.

Sincerely,

The FreeBSD Foundation