Linux 5.9 Dropping Soft Scrollback Support From FB + VGA Console Code
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for TheMightyBuzzard:
Linux 5.9 Dropping Soft Scrollback Support From FB + VGA Console Code - Phoronix:
VGACON/FBCON for the basic Linux console has supported a software scrollback buffer with the Shift + PageUp keyboard sequence for scrolling up in the output for contents out of view. But with most people not making heavy use of the frame-buffer console these days and the code being unmaintained, it's being stripped out from Linux 5.9.
As a post-5.9-rc5 change, Linus dropped the FBCON code and the similar VGACON scrollback support.
[Linus] Torvalds wrote, "This (and the VGA soft scrollback) turns out to have various nasty small special cases that nobody really is willing to fight. The soft scrollback code was really useful a few decades ago when you typically used the console interactively as the main way to interact with the machine, but that just isn't the case any more. So it's not worth dragging along."
I dunno about you lot but I absolutely still use soft scrollback. Not every day by any means but it's damned near essential if you or a system or driver update have somehow managed to get X into a hosed state and you don't normally have sshd enabled.
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