Xenix VP/IX serial driver support -- what is needed?

[~XT6510300~Frank McGee~C23~M24~6326~]

In article <3200 at ddsw1.MCS.COM> karl at ddsw1.MCS.COM (Karl Denninger) writes:
>Hello net.oracle! :-)
>We've got a small problem.  There's this serial driver that we have for
>Xenix & 386/ix.  The problem is that we need to handle VP/IX sessions on it,
>and currently it won't work - - complains about not being able to set the
>mode it wants, and then it's boom-boom time.
>Obviously since we're coming from a terminal we can't generate scan codes
>(they don't exist!).  How do we kludge things in such that it will work,
>even if only in "stupid" mode.

Please note that these comments refer to the AT&T Simultask product
which is based upon VP/ix; your mileage may vary on other vendors
products.

There are two issues here; the tty driver, and support of ascii terminals.

I haven't done any tty driver work myself, but as I understand it you
need to have a fairly "complete" tty driver to get it to work with
Simultask.  It needs to support a lot of the ioctl's that some ports
card manufacturers leave out since they are seldom used.  I don't know
exactly which ones you need to have to get VP/ix to work.  I'll look
and re-post if I find something.

As for ascii terminal support, there are special terminal translation
files in /usr/vpix/term/* to support non-scancode terminals.  It is
well documented in the AT&T docs how to get the translations you want.
A few things :
	o  You'll want to re-map keys like ALT, PgUp, Ins, Del, etc.
	   since many ascii terminals don't have these, yet many MSDOS
	   applications require these (and don't forget those
	   all-important function keys too).
	o  Your terminal will probably have to be 80 columns by 25
	   lines, EXACTLY.  I tried running ST 386 in a layers window
	   that was too wide and it munged things up.  If your terminal
	   is only 24 lines, count on one line being mysteriously eaten.

Note that there are PC scancode terminals out there (the AT&T 605 and
some Wyse terminals can do this).  The stuff in /usr/vpix/term/*
supports an init string and a closing string that you can use to take
it in and out of scancode mode.  The big advantage to those terminals
though is that they have all the right keys in all the right places
(atleast for a pc anyway), and have 25 lines.

You can run ST 386 in a layers window, but you need 3.2 Release 2.1 for
it to work (they must have changed the layers tty driver in the
update).  It DIDN'T work on vanilla AT&T 3.2.  Once I set my default
window size to 25x80, programmed f1-f8, and installed a terminfo to
know what f1-f8 were sending it worked fine.  7 windows, all running
ST 386 concurrently.

My guess is your tty driver isn't complete enough.  The error you
mentioned was the same error I got when I tried to run it in a layers
window with vanilla 3.2.

Hope this helps, I'll try to find the specific ioctl's you need to
support.

-- 
Frank McGee, AT&T
Tier 3 Indirect Channel Sales Support
attmail!fmcgee