Re: some console code checked in

[Roland McGrath]

> Yes, this is a serious problem.  It is also not easy to solve this in the
> kernel. What you can get easily is a beep that blocks the system, but I am
> not sure how hard it is to get a non-blocking beep at the kernel level
> (seems to require some interrupt stuff to switch it off at the right time?).

This is trivial in the kernel, and already done for your console ^G now.
(Conveniently we already have an interrupt just for such needs; it's called
the timer interrupt.)  See oskit-mach/oskit/pc/osenv_bell.c.

> Neal told me that doing multiple nodes like we want to is a pain in trivfs. 
> He did it this way in his procfs implementation (so I know it can be done),
> and he said it was a mistake.  Do you think trivfs would be better?

Well, I would need more details of what hassles he ran into before making a
suggestion.  trivfs is certainly designed to make this doable via its
hooks.  But I haven't written a trivfs filesystem like this, so I can
easily believe there are gotchas.  OTOH, netfs does not impose a lot of
structure on you, so using it is pretty easy too.  Whatever fits.