Hey folks.

I've noticed on a few of my vesafb test machines that in 8bpp  
paletted mode, the console text colour is a very dark grey. It seems  
that this is because I use rasops_cmap to initialize an "ANSI  
colourmap", and the definition of ``white'' is as follows:

         0xc7, 0xc7, 0xc7, /* white - XXX too dim? */

If I override this value in vesafb to something higher, let's say  
{ 0xdf, 0xdf, 0xdf }, then the text is actually readable. I've also  
heard reports of other users of rasops that have similar problems  
with the default text colour being too dim. In my experience though,  
not all VESA devices are nearly as dim.

Is there any reason to not just bump the values in sys/dev/rasops/ 
rasops.c:rasops_cmap? Or should hw drivers simply work around this?  
If the latter, a driver like vesafb would have no way of knowing as  
different VESA implementations appear to behave differently.

[side note: FreeBSD's default text colour is a much brighter white,  
and it seems certainly reasonable to me (let the flames begin)]

FYI, here's some examples of what I'm talking about (screenshots  
taken from VirtualPC).

Default vesafb, 0xc7 for "white":
   http://www.invisible.ca/~jmcneill/netbsd/rasops/NetBSD%20Picture% 
201.tiff
Modified vesafb, 0xdf for "white":
   http://www.invisible.ca/~jmcneill/netbsd/rasops/NetBSD%20Picture% 
202.tiff
Reference vga:
   http://www.invisible.ca/~jmcneill/netbsd/rasops/NetBSD%20Picture% 
203.tiff

Keep in mind that this is not a VirtualPC-specific problem; I have  
seen the problem elsewhere.

Cheers,
Jared