KernelTrap: tty Cleanup

“Alan Cox discussed his current efforts on improving the tty
layer, ‘at the moment tty buffers are attached directly to the tty.
This is causing a lot of the problems related to tty layer locking,
also problems at high speed and also with bursty data (such as
occurs in virtualised environments).’ The current implementation
includes what are called ‘flip buffers,’ a per device buffer for
data received from tty devices.

“Alan describes his current effort, ‘I’m working on ripping out
the flip buffers and replacing them with a pool of dynamically
allocated buffers. This allows both for old style ‘byte I/O’
devices and also helps virtualisation and smart devices where large
blocks of data suddenly materialise and need storing…'”

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