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vt: add VT_GETCONSIZECSRPOS to retrieve console size and cursor position

The console dimension and cursor position are available through the /dev/vcsa interface already. However the /dev/vcsa header format uses single-byte fields therefore those values are clamped to 255. As surprizing as this may seem, some people do use 240-column 67-row screens (a 1920x1080 monitor with 8x16 pixel fonts) which is getting close to the limit. Monitors with higher resolution are not uncommon these days (3840x2160 producing a 480x135 character display) and it is just a matter of time before someone with, say, a braille display using the Linux VT console and BRLTTY on such a screen reports a bug about missing and oddly misaligned screen content. Let's add VT_GETCONSIZECSRPOS for the retrieval of console size and cursor position without byte-sized limitations. The actual console size limit as encoded in vt.c is 32767x32767 so using a short here is appropriate. Then this can be used to get the cursor position when /dev/vcsa reports 255. The screen dimension may already be obtained using TIOCGWINSZ and adding the same information to VT_GETCONSIZECSRPOS might be redundant. However applications that care about cursor position also care about display size and having 2 separate system calls to obtain them separately is wasteful. Also, the cursor position can be queried by writing "\e[6n" to a tty and reading back the result but that may be done only by the actual application using that tty and not a sideline observer.

Nicolas Pitre committed 1 year ago

Commit 81cf4d71 parent 80fa7a02 files · +27 −0Browse files

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include/uapi/linux/vt.h+11−0
@@ -2,6 +2,8 @@ · 1 unmodified line
22 #ifndef _UAPI_LINUX_VT_H
33 #define _UAPI_LINUX_VT_H
44
5+#include <linux/ioctl.h>
6+#include <linux/types.h>
57
68 /*
79 * These constants are also useful for user-level apps (e.g., VC
@@ -84,4 +86,13 @@ struct vt_setactivate { · 76 unmodified lines
8486
8587 #define VT_SETACTIVATE 0x560F /* Activate and set the mode of a console */
8688
89+/* get console size and cursor position */
90+struct vt_consizecsrpos {
91+ __u16 con_rows; /* number of console rows */
92+ __u16 con_cols; /* number of console columns */
93+ __u16 csr_row; /* current cursor's row */
94+ __u16 csr_col; /* current cursor's column */
95+};
96+#define VT_GETCONSIZECSRPOS _IOR('V', 0x10, struct vt_consizecsrpos)
97+
8798 #endif /* _UAPI_LINUX_VT_H */