On Mon, 13 Mar 2017 13:53:55 +0100
poma <pomidorabelisima(a)gmail.com> wrote:
That "sophisticated" software "that runs the virtual
consoles" with
multiple outputs is called X Window System, be it X11 or Wayland. So
if you ask the Linux kernel console to be the X Window System, well,
it is, already! Do you follow? :)
I think you are thinking of xterms, that run under X. But the virtual
consoles are started by agetty at startup, and when I look in man
agetty, I don't see any way to tell agetty which hardware to use.
Systemd might be able to somehow do that when it starts the consoles.
Maybe some can be set to permanently use a different video output
device. I didn't look into it deeply enough to find how the output
device is set.
I see that only in kernel 4.11 has the framebuffer code been
enhanced to allow for separate buffers for each virtual console, and I
think that would be essential for using separate screens, though I
haven't got it working. Because they share a scrollback buffer, if I log
into two virtual consoles and do output in both, I lose the ability to
scroll backward in a virtual console if I switch to another virtual
console and back because of this. Using screen in a virtual console
already has this capability, but that is because screen provides it.