Re: console in 11.0-ALPHA4

On Monday, June 20, 2016 04:54:11 PM Ernie Luzar wrote:
> Ed Maste wrote:
> > On 20 June 2016 at 14:29, Ernie Luzar <luzar722_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> >> I found the cause of this boot time message
> >> "vicontrol: setting cursor type: Inappropriate ioctl for device"
> >>
> >> In my rc.conf I had this statement
> >> vidcontrol -c blink -h 250
> >> From testing it seems that vt does not handle the "blink" option for causing
> >> the cursor to blink. Is there a vt option to enable cursor  blinking
> > 
> > I've submitted two PRs for the issues you reported here:
> > Bug 210413 - vidcontrol -c <normal|blink|destructive> does not work with vt(4)
> > Bug 210415 - vidcontrol -h <history size> does not work with vt(4) (edit)
> > 
> > There is currently no option to enable cursor blinking.
> 
> 
> Further testing shows that:
> 
> 1. The rc.conf option screen saver "saver= " and the "blanktime= " 
> options work in vt for both text and graph modes.
> 
> 2. The cursor copy/paste does not work in vt text mode. It only works in 
> vt graph mode. vt needs to be fixed so copy/paste function also works in 
> text mode.
> 
> 3. Boot time splash screen does not work in vt at all no matter which 
> mode is enabled. Using this in loader.conf
> splash_bmp_load="YES"
> bitmap_name="/boot/splash.bmp"
> bitload_load="YES"
> 
> This works in 10.x. The splash screen function can not be allowed to be 
> removed from the base system just because vt can not handle it. This 
> also means any vt changes need to updated in the handbook section on 
> splash screen.
> 
> In conclusion, vt is not ready to replace the sc console driver yet. vt 
> needs to be fixed before becoming the default in 11.0. Using vt as the 
> default console driver effects every user. It completely changes the 
> FreeBSD experience. It's detrimental to the public relations and the 
> professional image of FreeBSD to publish the 11.0-RELEASE using vt in 
> its current condition. If time doesn't permit to get these vt things 
> fixed before publishing 11.0 then vt should not become the default 
> console driver.

OTOH, if you use EFI, then you can't use sc(4).  You get no working console
with EFI (which is becoming more popular) if you use sc(4).  You also do
not get non-ASCII characters with sc(4), so you don't have a UTF-8 capable
console if you use sc(4).  You also do not have a working console after
loading the KMS drivers (either by starting X or via explicit kldload) when
using sc(4).  This affects just about every modern Intel system using an
Intel GPU (so more widespread than EFI even).

There are tradeoffs in both directions.  Neither console is a subset of the
other.  However, sc(4) is not really extendable to support the things it is
missing.  vt(4) is actively worked on, and patches for the features it lacks
that you need are certainly welcomed.

-- 
John Baldwin