This is a Linux thing, not a UNIX one, by the way.
Try ctrl-alt-f8. Do you get a blank screen? It wouldn't switch you to a terminal that doesn't exist, so a blank screen means you have an 8th terminal. It's just not used by anything.
I think there's a hardcoded 12 terminals, one for each function key, handled by the 'vga console' device driver inside the kernel itself. It's somewhat arbitrary and not likely to change. I think even the switching behavior is mostly hardcoded.
But beyond that, they're just devices. What things talk to what devices depends on your system. On my server:
See the part in red? Terminals 1 through 6 have logins because, in runlevels 2 through 5, init runs agetty for them. (In runlevel 1, you only get ctrl-alt-f1, looks like.) If you copy those lines to make entries for tty8-12, they ought to work. Delete the line for tty6 and you won't get a login prompt on ctrl-alt-f6 next reboot.
Traditionally you get 1-6 as terminal logins, the 7th is saved for your X server(you can switch in and out of GUI just by switching consoles), and the rest are left for custom uses.
So what's your system?
Last edited by Corona688; 12-16-2011 at 06:49 PM..
As Corona said, this REEEEALLY depends what flavor of linux + version you're running. For example, if you're running a recent version of Fedora, you won't see anything like that in /etc/inittab. (However, if your inittab does look like that, I can confirm that there's nothing wrong with adding additional respawn lines for higher numbered ttys.)
In other news: chvt is the command you want to switch consoles, especially if you start processes on ones higher than tty12.
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//from local zone (myzone1)
swap -s
total: 22888544k bytes allocated + 0k reserved = 22888544k used, 3325856k available
swap -l
swapfile dev swaplo blocks free
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