Multiple Manitors, Keyboards, Mice
Multiple Manitors, Keyboards, Mice
- Subject: Multiple Manitors, Keyboards, Mice
- From: P Teeson <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2009 09:26:40 -0400
I posted the following email on Darwin-dev and got kind feedback from Jens Alfke. The pointer to the Singh book on OS X internals was especially useful.
Does anyone else have additional comments wrt to what would be required to do what I propose? Or should I just forget the whole idea?
TIA for your wisdom. respect...
Peter
My environment: Snow Leopard 10.6.1 on a MacPro Nehalem 2-CPU 6GB
Many years ago I worked as a system pgmr on IBM "big iron" on a timesharing system.
However I do not know much about the internals of Unix.
Mac OS X will allow multiple users logged on (as per fast user switching).
I am interested in learning how to attach additional Monitors,Keyboards,Mice
to the users who are not the "front" one.
My limited understanding is that Unix can be run as a time-shared OS.
So please advise me which documentation to read to gain a better understanding
of how to approach this for the Mac OS.
TIA for your advice...
respect...
Peter
Jens then replied I am interested in learning how to attach additional Monitors,Keyboards,Mice
to the users who are not the "front" one.
You can't; the GUI doesn't support that. Only one user can be active at a time.
and I replied
Because I haven't yet found the proper docs my speculation runs as follows: (0) The boot process builds hardware device tables (1) the login process allocates resources per user. Among this is the association of hardware including Monitor, Keyboard, Mouse. (2) When switching users that allocation is associated with the new "front" user.
Therefore there only needs to be a mechanism whereby specific devices can remain allocated to the "background" user and available devices associated with the new "front" user.
and Jens said
It is definitely possible that the OS could be made to support multiple users on different screens. But the details of it would certainly take a long time to implement (for Apple; the software at that level is closed source)
and there seems little practical reason to do it.
then I said: As to a practical reason to do it - I do have an idea for something which is why I'm doing the research.
to which Jens replied
FYI, I don't think this type of thing can be implemented by 3rd parties.
It would certainly involve complex changes to the WindowServer, which is closed source.
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