4.2 BSD Signals: A Proposal

[tjt at kobold.UUCP]

Actually, this is a follow-on to:

	    Also, it has always bothered me that the terminal driver in 4.1 made it
	    necessary to do as many as 4 ioctls in order to do logically-connected
	    things.  That was a compatibility move too...  Of course, this change
	    doesn't using the new semantics clumsy.
    
    This was actually somewhat inherited from V7; the System III/System V handler
    cleans this up, although if 4.3BSD or whatever picked up the USG tty driver
    and then re-Berkeleyized it they might have to introduce a second "ioctl" to
    turn on the local flags and supply the local control characters, which would
    bring us back to where we started from...

If you "re-Berkeleyize" the USG tty driver, any additional ioctl should
work in the spirit of the USG ioctl's, and let you set *all* the flag
words/special characters with a single ioctl.  I thought part of the
reason for all them ioctl's in the 4BSD tty driver (actually from
IIASA) was leftover from V6 days when the stty/gtty entry point was
passed *exactly* three int's (or six char's) from user space, and this
was carried over as a superstition.
-- 
	Tom Teixeira,  Massachusetts Computer Corporation.  Westford MA
	...!{ihnp4,harpo,decvax}!masscomp!tjt   (617) 692-6200 x275