too many virtual terminals by defaut

[Ben Gamari]

On Wed, 31 Mar 2010 18:57:10 -0300, Flávio Etrusco <flavio.etrusco at gmail.com> wrote:
> IIRC Fedora lowered the number of login terminals for reasons other
> than process/memory overhead - though I can't remember what reasons
> were from the top of my head ;-)
> BTW, does a terminal allocate any video memory when using KMS?

No, at most it will claim 1 few kBytes for storing the terminal (character
cell) content itself, but this is not video memory in the world of KMS. Only
later is this data drawn to the framebuffer (which is video memory).

> I assume anyone using a high number of text/login terminals to be a
> server administrator? Is 6 enough? What about Screen?
> 
Your assumption is very flawed. I am not a server administrator and yet find
myself dropping into VTs all the time. There simply is no good reason to reduce
the default count, as far as I can see. The 5 getty processes incur no
scheduling overhead (they are blocking on their ttys from the moment they
start), have only kilobytes of memory usage, are used on a daily basis for who
knows how many people.

While Brandon's original tone was quite harsh, I agree with his sentiments. It
seems like this thread is looking to solve a non-existent problem with a very
unappealing solution.

Cheers,

- Ben