Xen devel - Oct 2007 - Additional terminals for debugging custom OS

Dear xen-devel,

My partner and I are working to port an "educational"
UNIX-like operating system from a custom simulator to
the Xen platform for an operating systems class here
at Brown University.

Traditionally, students interacted with this OS (named
"Weenix") through three terminals which were exposed
to Weenix as character devices /dev/tty0 through
/dev/tty3. Additional, the actual terminal through
which the Weenix system had been started would serve
as a console for printing "meta" debugging output to
(this terminal would not be visible to Weenix itself).

We''ve made significant ground porting Weenix to Xen
(which we have renamed "Wox"), however, we''re a bit
hung up in trying to simulate those original three
terminals without going overboard.

We''ve toyed with the idea of simply using escape
sequence to "split" a single terminal, but this seems
ugly and is not truly what we''d like. We''d much prefer
a way to attach multiple terminals to a single Weenix
instance such that Weenix can interact with these
terminals as if they were character devices. 

One option seems to be modifying the "back-end" driver
utilized by block I/O devices but this seems as though
it would require us to alter Xen itself. Beyond this,
we''re really not sure how to proceed. Any pointers or
general advice would be greatly appreciated.
Unfortunately, Weenix doesn''t have a network stack;
it''s only three or four times more complex than
mini-os :)

Thank you very much!

Brandon & Dan
Brown University




     
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