Ed Schouten has been awarded a grant to write a new console driver for the FreeBSD project. The FreeBSD Foundation is excited to support Ed in providing a more efficient and user-friendly console driver.

This project will allow Ed to add an additional abstraction layer to the kernel. This new terminal layer will sit between the TTY layer, the kernel console and the actual console driver. The existing terminal emulator will be moved into the new terminal layer.

The advantage of the new layer is that the console driver itself will not have to handle any TTY semantics and will just receive a set of character drawing, filling and copying actions. This should make it easier to implement Unicode. It will also be much easier to make the boot process look nice on desktop systems such as PC-BSD).

This project will be completed by the end of December, 2009.

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