ite - HP Internal Terminal Emulator
ite* at grf?
TTY special files of the form /dev/ttye? are interfaces to
the HP ITE
for bit-mapped displays as implemented under OpenBSD. An ITE
is the main
system console on most HP300 workstations and is the mechanism through
which a user communicates with the machine. If more than
one display exists
on a system, any or all can be used as ITEs with the
limitation that
only the first one opened will have a keyboard (since only
one keyboard
is supported).
ITE devices use the HP-UX `300h' termcap(5) or terminfo(5)
entries. However,
as currently implemented, the ITE does not support the
full range
of HP-UX capabilities for this device. Missing are multiple
colors, underlining,
blinking, softkeys, programmable tabs, scrolling
memory and
keyboard arrow keys. The keyboard does not have any of the
international
character support of HP's NLS system. It does use the left
and right
extend char keys as meta keys, in that it will set the
eighth bit of the
character code.
Upon booting, the kernel will first look for an ITE device
to use as the
system console (/dev/console). If a display exists at any
hardware address,
it will be the console.
When activated as an ITE (special file opened), all displays
go through a
standard initialization sequence. The frame buffer is
cleared, the ROM
fonts are unpacked and loaded into off-screen storage and a
cursor appears.
The ITE initialization routine also sets the colormap entry used
to white. Variable colors are not used, mainly for reasons
of simplicity.
The font pixels are all set to 0xff and the colormap
entry corresponding
to all planes is set to R=255, G=255 and B=255.
The actual number
of planes used to display the characters depends on the
hardware installed.
Finally, if the keyboard HIL device is not already
assigned to
another ITE device, it is placed in ``cooked'' mode and assigned to this
ITE.
On most systems, a display is used both as an ITE
(/dev/ttye? aka
/dev/console) and as a graphics device (/dev/grf?). In this
environment,
there is some interaction between the two uses that should
be noted. For
example, opening /dev/grf0 will deactivate the ITE, that is,
write over
whatever may be on the ITE display. When the graphics application is
finished and /dev/grf0 closed, the ITE will be reinitialized
with the
frame buffer cleared and the ITE colormap installed.
cons(4), dvbox(4), gbox(4), grf(4), hil(4), hyper(4), intro(4), rbox(4),
topcat(4)
OpenBSD 3.6 June 9, 1993
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