Are textmode consoles/terminals still supported?

[Chris H]

I'm attempting to get a video card that DTRT on FreeBSD.
I started with the graphics provided by an AMD A6-7470K,
only to discover it's not yet supported. So I forked out
for a recent nvidia card, and build/installed a new
world/kernel.
Everything seemed to be as one would expect, except there
was an issue with loader.efi. So I had to move mine aside,
and use the one off the install media (tho I understand
the (u)efi has since been fixed). Now, I'm attempting to
obtain textmode. The text stripped from a tty, and pasted
to a new file in a textmode editor -- ee(1) for example;
pads the line with spaces to EOL, and prefaces each line
following the first line with rubbish (about 1 to 2
characters worth).
So "graphics mode" or vt(4) isn't going to get it, for me.
Textmode, and syscons(4) has always worked as expected, and
I thought I'd try to re-enable it, or get textmode via vt(4).
But all attempts fail.
excerpt from my KERNCONF

device vga
options VESA

device sc
options SC_PIXEL_MODE

device vt
device vt_vga
device vt_efifb

However, following the advice on the freebsd wiki, querying
the value in sysctl(8) returns:
# sysctl hw.vga.textmode
sysctl: unknown oid 'hw.vga.textmode'

OK how bout vidcontrol(1)
# vidcontrol -i adapter
vidcontrol: obtaining adapter information: Inappropriate ioctl for device

So, it appears from my standpoint that textmode is no longer
supported?

FWIW:
FreeBSD trump.whitehouse.gov.test 12.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 12.0-CURRENT #0 r314700:
Sun Mar 5 09:01:30 PST 2017
ro...@trump.whitehouse.gov.test:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/TESTKERN amd6

Thank you for anything that might help me obtain textmode again.

--Chris


_______________________________________________
freebsd...@freebsd.org mailing list
https://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-curre...@freebsd.org"

[Steven Hartland]

Add the following to /boot/loader.conf

Its a tunable but not a sysctl so you can't query it, you just need to
set it by adding it to /boot/loader.conf:
hw.vga.textmode="1"

[Toomas Soome]

The problem with UEFI is that the fact if you can only get “text” aka VGA text mode if your card happens to have the proper firmware and you can set up the card… UEFI as such does only provide framebuffer based console, and that framebuffer is either linear memory mapped or pure software - in last case only KMS console framebuffer will do any good.

rgds,
toomas

[O. Hartmann]

Am Mon, 20 Mar 2017 16:06:43 -0700
"Chris H" <bsd-...@bsdforge.com> schrieb:

> On Mon, 20 Mar 2017 22:02:06 +0000 Steven Hartland <kil...@multiplay.co.uk>
> wrote

>
> > Add the following to /boot/loader.conf
> >
> > Its a tunable but not a sysctl so you can't query it, you just need to
> > set it by adding it to /boot/loader.conf:
> > hw.vga.textmode="1"
> >

> WOW. Thanks for the fast reply!
>
> I gave your suggestion a try. But it was ignored. :-(
> All my other boxes run the nvidia blob, and provide textmode,
> and support sc/syscons(4). But I'm not using (u)efi on them.
> Maybe that's the trouble?
>
> Thanks again, Steven!
>
> --Chris

I use non-UEFI booting machines with vt()-only and the nVidia BLOB (regular one from
ports and even the latest 378.13). The console is not working anymore and provides
garbage as long as vt() is in charge. On UEFI only systems, vt() is required, sc/syscons
doesn't work anymore (I don't care, I'd like to move on). So, with nVidia, you are
lost.

The problem with vt() and nVidia is well known and it is well known more than a year by
now if I recall correctly. Nothing has been done by nVidia so far and as far as I know,
the maintainer hasn't solved the problem. I do not know whether nVidia is willing to
solve the issue. I left an question in their forum, but it seems FreeBSD is more
handled like a "unpleasant necessity". On the other hand, GPU and such related stuff
(GPGPU for instance) is a wasteland in FreeBSD and it seems their world is still made up
from blocky ASCII terminals. Not that I dislike serial terminals, they save your ass
sometimes and for server management, one doesn't really need the additional,
non-fault-free complexity graphical UI introduce, but with the capabilities of handling
graphics the proper way much more is usually related to.

nVidia is, at the moment, the only GPU provider which supports FreeBSD. If you'd like to
have a workstation with high performance graphical capabilities on FreeBSD, there is no
way around nVidia. With most recent modern hardware, UEFI is standard and there the
console is gone as long the nVidia kernel module is loaded - you have no chance to get
to the console anymore, except you're capable of unloading (remotely?) the kernel
module. As a matter of fact, the system is broken!

Regards,

Oliver

--
O. Hartmann

Ich widerspreche der Nutzung oder Übermittlung meiner Daten für
Werbezwecke oder für die Markt- oder Meinungsforschung (§ 28 Abs. 4 BDSG).