Terminal paging in the kernel

[Steve Zimmerman]

Dave Ihnat brings up an objection to page mode that I neglected to
answer in my original message and which, for the sake of completeness, I
feel obliged to answer:

	*You* are making assumptions about what a terminal is, in a piece of
	common code--that it's 24 lines long, and maybe 80 characters wide.

Page mode has never made any such assumptions.  Even the original, two
dozen line version had code for an ioctl to set the terminal screen
size.  This ioctl is typically used by stty; when the user says "stty
page", the stty program uses termcap to find the size of the screen, and
then uses this as an argument to the ioctl.  Alternatively, you can do
something like "stty page 66" to override what termcap believes.  The
important thing to note is that you have full functionality and
generality here, yet it is the user program (in this case stty) that
does most of the work.  I've always been for keeping the kernel simple;
I've saved all my complicated code for my EMACS!

	Steve Zimmerman