Framebuffer console font size selection issues?

["John D. Baker" <jdbaker%consolidated.net@localhost>]

Now that i915drmkms seems to be working in HEAD (9.99.97), I was annoyed
that on a machine with a 1024x768 display, the framebuffer console
selected the 16x32 font (GENERIC kernel), yielding a console terminal
of 64x24.

While it may be closer to 80x24 than if the 8x16 font were selected, I
consider a line length less than 80 to be undesirable.

So, I played around with 'wsfontload' and 'wsconsctl'.  It took a while
to figure out how to switch to the 8x16 font because nowhere is the
format of the output of 'wsfontload -l' described.  After playing with
loading other font files, I now know that it is:

  Name  WxL

and that "Name" may contain spaces.  Perhaps this should be documented.

So, I managed to switch "ttyE0" ("constty") to "Boldface" (8x16).  I
tried to do the same for the other virtual terminals, but "/dev/ttyE0"
seems hard-coded rather than operate on the current terminal or to be
able to specify a terminal.  How can I change the font on "/dev/ttyE[1-3]"?

Yes, I can build a custom kernel with my own font preferences and
I usually use "GLASS10x19" because I like the authentic VT220 look
or some machines have XXdrmkms disabled entirely for a plain VGA
console as they are servers that are usually only accessed via SSH.

Admittedly I mostly treat the "GENERIC" kernel as a disaster-recovery
tool but I'd rather see more on the screen than less--especially
kernel messages and DDB output.  This is particularly necessary on a
small display.


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