Reasons to preseve X on tty7

Bill Nottingham notting at redhat.com
Wed Oct 29 21:51:23 UTC 2008


Dan Nicholson (dbn.lists at gmail.com) said: 
> > * The default behavior of X on tty7 has been in place since the
> > beginning (almost a decade and a half).
> 
> This is actually convention, not any enforced behavior. There is
> nothing magic about tty7. It just so happens that the typical init
> configuration has been gettys on the first 6 ttys. When X starts, it
> simply chooses the next available VT. This has always been
> configurable - /etc/inittab with sysvinit and now
> /etc/event.d/tty[1-6] with upstart. Personally, I always thought that
> 6 consoles was more than I've ever wanted, so for me the "default" X
> was tty4.

The fact that it's just convention based on the number of ttys 
configured (that the admin can override) also means that any
change to unilaterally swtich to tty7 in plymouth means you're
potentially stomping on a local-use-for-something-else tty. I
don't think telling admins "if you want to run top on tty7, or
have already configured your system to do so, you need to edit some
plymouth thing and re-run mkinitrd for any kernel you want to boot"
is something that's necessarily going to fly.

Realistically, if you're going to start a boot process by default on a
particular *specific* tty, tty1 is the only sanely implementable answer,
as it's the one that's guaranteed to be available for use by the boot
process. (Unless you *really* mangle your init configuration... in
which case you probably broke the existing bootup before any of this
happened.)

Bill




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