ITE(4) OpenBSD Programmer's Manual (HP300) ITE(4)
NAME
ite - HP Internal Terminal Emulator
SYNOPSIS
ite* at grf?
DESCRIPTION
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 ex-
ists 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. How-
ever, as currently implemented, the ITE does not support the full range
of HP-UX capabilities for this device. Missing are multiple colors, un-
derlining, 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 ad-
dress, 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 ap-
pears. The ITE initialization routine also sets the colormap entry used
to white. Variable colors are not used, mainly for reasons of simplici-
ty. The font pixels are all set to 0xff and the colormap entry corre-
sponding to all planes is set to R=255, G=255 and B=255. The actual num-
ber of planes used to display the characters depends on the hardware in-
stalled. 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.
SEE ALSO
cons(4), dvbox(4), gbox(4), grf(4), hil(4), hyper(4), intro(4), rbox(4),
topcat(4)
OpenBSD 3.6 June 9, 1993 1