GIGONDO FONT in VT

sgharms

sgharms

I've recently been bouncing between 14.3-RELEASE and 15.0-CURRENT BE's. It's pretty great.

After my latest reboot my VT text is like...HUGE. It is HUGE before the boot menu and it's HUGE after (pic below).

IMG_3278.jpg


My logic holds that this can't be related to the kernel I'm using because this "zoomed in" or "wrong resolution" experience is happening at bootloader time. And then (perhaps?) the kernel and the VT subsystem are taking cues from it about what my desired font should be. But as contrary signal, looking in dmesg, the log holds that I'm being set for (VT(efifb): resolution 1920x1080).

1. How can i get the size back normal (did I miss some step around EFI when I installed a 15.0-CURRENT BE?)
2. Is this something I could change on the fly? This huge font is kinda nice for when I forget my glasses and don't want to get up again :)


Background:
G

Thread 'Resolution at boot'

I'm back to using FreeBSD (14.1-RELEASE) after a long stop on Gentoo. I would like to solve the following aesthetic problem. When I boot, a text at too low resolution appears and flows quite quickly on the screen (perhaps 640x480) and then the panel appears with the possible operational choices: Boot multiuser, Boot single user, Escape, Reboot, etc. From here on, the text is pleasantly in 1920x1080 resolution and remains so until the appearance of the graphic environment. How to also have the previous text at the same resolution or at a resolution greater than 640x480?
 
OK, so some interesting data points.

1. If, from the 15.0-CURRENT running experience, i set `bectl activate -t default` the pre-menu and post-menu text is the correct size
2. If, at the boot menu, I use 8 to cycle through my boot environments it's very slow and very large text still. It adds credence to the idea that I'm being treated as if I'm on a serial connection, an idea SirDice incepted me with in the thread above.


I know that we don't support 15.0-CURRENT at these forums. But I would love to know how to change the font size per question 2, above and I would like to know whether I missed a step in building my boot environment (was I supposed to do something with the .efi file?).

Thanks!
 
You could install the -CURRENT bootloader. That might have fixed some bugs that were present in the 14.x bootloader (loader.efi(8)). The bootloader is backwards compatible, so a newer bootloader will be able to load and start an older FreeBSD version without issue.

But whatever you do, do not upgrade the ZFS pool with ZFS from -CURRENT. Because that will break your 14.x BE.
 
SirDice said:
You could install the -CURRENT bootloader. That might have fixed some bugs that were present in the 14.x bootloader (loader.efi(8)). The bootloader is backwards compatible, so a newer bootloader will be able to load and start an older FreeBSD version without issue.

But whatever you do, do not upgrade the ZFS pool with ZFS from -CURRENT. Because that will break your 14.x BE.
Click to expand...
1. I don't know how to upgrade a zfs pool, so I think I'm unlikely to do that. This is just a FreeBSD laptop, so I think I'm unlikely to misstep into that, no?

2. RE: bootloader porting. My only reference for how to do that in the context of BEs is vermaden 's post : https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2021/02/23/upgrade-freebsd-with-zfs-boot-environments/

tbqh, I'm a little scared of that. Is there another reference that I can use to contextualize dark
dd(1) magic?
 
sgharms said:
I don't know how to upgrade a zfs pool, so I think I'm unlikely to do that. This is just a FreeBSD laptop, so I think I'm unlikely to misstep into that, no?
Click to expand...
zpool-upgrade(8), which you have to do manually. But make sure you're running 14.x when you do. 15 will be able to read a 14 pool but not the other way around.

sgharms said:
tbqh, I'm a little scared of that. Is there another reference that I can use to contextualize dark
dd(1) magic?
Click to expand...
Don't need for dd(1) at all. Just boot 15-CURRENT, make sure /boot/efi is mounted and cp(1) /boot/loader.efi to /boot/efi/EFI/FreeBSD/loader.efi (assuming you have set efibootmgr(8) to boot from ${EFI}/EFI/FreeBSD/loader.efi). If there's only one installed OS (different BEs are still one OS installation), you may have /boot/efi/EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi (this is a default location UEFI will look for).

Oh, this all does assume you are UEFI booting, which may or may not be the case. What does sysctl machdep.bootmethod output?
 
It looks like a font problem to me.
The largest font in 14.x releases is 16x32 pixels, whereas 15.0 introduces a new font: 32x64, probably for 4K displays... And 1920 / 32 = 60 characters per line, which is exactly what your image shows. So I would say that your system starts with the proper native resolution 1920x1080, but then selects a font too large.

Try adding the following file to /boot/loader.conf.d/ directory. The name of the file must end with ".conf", say /boot/loader.conf.d/console_font.conf

Code: 
# Set the font to match my screen resolution 1920x1080.
screen.font="16x32"

Is this something I could change on the fly?
Click to expand...
Sure! vidcontrol -f spleen-32x64 and vidcontrol -f spleen-16x32 would change the font in the current VT. You may even have bigger font in some VTs and smaller font in other VTs. Try vidcontrol -f spleen-32x64 < /dev/ttyvN for that. See /usr/share/vt/fonts for the list of available fonts.
 
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