kern/143370: splash_txt ASCII splash screen module

Hi all,

Not sure if this is the right place to post it -- about 6 years ago I
put together a module which displays an ASCII splash screen on boot
(rather than the graphical splash_pcx and splash_bmp modules). We have
been running it in production since that time without issue.

With the the code slush for 9.0 on the horizon, I thought it might
again be worth trying to see if someone is prepared to get this into
the tree so others can benefit from it. I have a PR open, kern/143370,
which includes the patch for the module; it is against 7.0 but has
been used largely unmodified since 4.x days. It currently builds on
8.x still fine as we are running it in production on 8.x for $WORK.

Summary of instructions from my previous post about this from ~18mths ago:

In case the list eats the patch, you can grab a copy of it here:

http://www.mawer.org/freebsd/splash_txt.patch

To give you an idea of what it looks like, here is a screenshot of a
quick generic FreeBSD splash screen I put together:

http://www.mawer.org/freebsd/splash_txt_1.png
http://www.mawer.org/freebsd/splash_txt_2.png

If you'd like to try it for yourself then the process to build it
should be something like this:

1. Download the attached patch
2. Create the required folders before applying the patch -- cd
/usr/src && mkdir sys/modules/splash/txt
3. Apply the patch -- patch < splash_txt.patch
4. Build the module -- cd sys/modules/splash/txt && make && make install

Once that's completed, you can configure it by adding the following to
loader.conf:

splash_txt_load="YES"
bitmap_load="YES"
bitmap_name="/boot/freebsd.bin"

I have uploaded two sample boot splash screens at
http://www.mawer.org/freebsd/freebsd1.bin and
http://www.mawer.org/freebsd/freebsd2.bin . The files can be produced
using TheDraw and saving in its Binary file format, which consists of
a sequence of 2 byte pairs. The first byte in a pair is the character
to draw on the screen, and the second is the colour/display attributes
to draw the character with.

If anyone else would like to try this out and has any feedback, or if
someone thinks it may be of interest to integrate into the tree please
let me know ...

Otherwise if anyone would like to help push this into the tree in time
for 9.0 would be great. It should be safe to MFC to 8.x as well -- as
I said we've been running it ever since 4.x days. I am sure others out
there would gain at least some (cosmetic) benefits from this!

-- Antony