Re: newcons comming

On 10 February 2014 16:07, Alexey Dokuchaev <danfe_at_freebsd.org> wrote:
>
> 1. Before going X, switching consoles took considerable time (about or more
> than one second).  Every time my monitor briefly displayed mode information
> pane like it does when new mode is being switched.  It does not happen after
> X was loaded, and while console text is pretty small now (LCD runs at native
> resolution for all consoles, text ones + X), I'm wondering why it cannot be
> done up front, without having to startx first.

You should be able to manually load the kms modules to switch to
native resolution, without starting X.  This should also be possible
from the loader, although there's a known issue with i915kms on
certain hardware, like X2xx Thinkpads.

> Also, even at native resolution, switching consoles takes LCD considerable
> time to redraw screen contents.  Looks like it's not accelerated at all...

Can you quantify "considerable time," and describe the hardware on
which you observe this?

On my Thinkpad X220 it's not noticeably laggy, with either the VGA
driver (at boot) or i915kms.  In Virtualbox it is observably slow
right now, but not unusably so.

> 2. Is there way to change fonts apart from patching the kernel source code
> and using tools from https://github.com/emaste/fontstuff?  Can I use more
> than one font (e.g. for different Unicode code point ranges)?

We will ship a set of fonts in /usr/share, and vidcontrol will gain
the ability to load those fonts for vt(9).  For now you can build the
font tools in tools/tools/vt/fontcvt and tools/tools/vt/setfont to
convert a .bdf font and load it.

The current plan is to support only one font (per vt) in the kernel.
Any mixing would be done in userland.

-Ed