ITE(4)

NAME
ite - HP Internal Terminal Emulator

DESCRIPTION
TTY special files of the form ``ttye?'' are interfaces to the HP ITE for bit-mapped displays as implemented under BSD. 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 exists 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. However, as currently implemented, the ITE does not support the full range of HP-UX capabilities for this device. Missing are multiple colors, underlining, 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 address, it will be the console. The kernel looks for, in order: a 98544, 98545, or 98547 Topcat display, a 98700 Gatorbox at a supported address (see gb(4)), or a 98720 Renaissance at a supported address (see rb(4)). Currently there is no ITE support for the 98548, 98549, 98550 and 98556 boards.

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 appears. The ITE initialization routine also sets the colormap entry used to white. Variable colors are not used, mainly for reasons of simplicity. The font pixels are all set to 0xff and the colormap entry corresponding to all planes is set to R=255, G=255 and B=255. The actual number of planes used to display the characters depends on the hardware installed. 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.

DIAGNOSTICS
None under BSD.

SEE ALSO
grf(4), hil(4), gb(4), rb(4), tc(4)