Screen buffer

[Matthew Hawkins]

On Wed, 01 Aug 2001, Peter Petroff wrote:
> Hello everybody. I have a question about the screen buffer in linux
> (shift+pgup). On my PC it holds about 10 screens on a tty. On what
> depends this number?

Video memory

> Can it be increased?

Depends on your video card.

> Can the buffer be retined when switching from one tty to another (alt+
> Fn)?

Not easily.  It's tricky because you have to mess around with buffers,
remembering which terminals are which buffers and writing in the
background, the buffers are all mapped in kernel memory and would bloat
it out considerably.  There's also security concerns because anything
writing to the terminal, hence the buffer, hence kernel memory could
theoretically exploit it to elevate privileges.

> I would appreciate any replies or suggested readings cause I have no
> clue about this subject :) Thanks

There's more doco in the Linux HOWTOs etc.

What you might like to look at instead is running "screen" or similar
program, which gives you multiple terminals with scrollback as far as
you want to set and cut & paste etc.

-- 
Matt