Date: Fri, 27 Feb 2015 13:15:49 -0800 From: Adrian Chadd <adrian@freebsd.org> To: Polytropon <freebsd@edvax.de> Cc: FreeBSD Questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Why all the fancy ASCII art in the boot loader? Message-ID: <CAJ-Vmok0bqucvXaAha3%2BE4JPQK_C31QG5gbR3Z-cE_i-hhD21Q@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <20150227192136.65a79cb4.freebsd@edvax.de> References: <20150222164422.D89FCA0168@smtp.hushmail.com> <20150222175145.6b2cb583.freebsd@edvax.de> <20150227015057.4E2F3C0431@smtp.hushmail.com> <20150227105547.d4884de7.freebsd@edvax.de> <20150227111527.3b2cf9e6@archlinux> <CAJ-VmomiK=WRB5Ljvcg=MRtJmk9eKmMO=gbQZGkpKvBp0D23sA@mail.gmail.com> <20150227192136.65a79cb4.freebsd@edvax.de>
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On 27 February 2015 at 10:21, Polytropon <freebsd@edvax.de> wrote: > On Fri, 27 Feb 2015 10:05:53 -0800, Adrian Chadd wrote: >> The company that I work for ships appliances and VM images for said >> appliance; having a VGA splash screen would be great. >> >> I'm working on VESA support for the loader (and general graphics >> framebuffer support for all platforms, since not all the world is >> x86.) > > Do you know about this project? > > https://wiki.freebsd.org/OliverFromme/BootLoader > > Maybe it could be put into active development and finally > become a (selectable) part of the default OS installation? Yup. I started by getting that to work on -HEAD. Problem is, it's limited to 640x480 and it's only useful for x86. So I started down the rabbit hole of making it aware of VESA and making it more flexible. > >> If nothing else, being able to have loader and kernel boot into >> a high res text mode would be really helpful for debugging. > > Until the letters become unreadable. ;-) So you load an 8x16 or a 16x32 font, and everything's fine. :) > No, seriously: Tiny letters in text mode, usually a "feature" > of today's Linux, can be annoying when you don't sit infront > of a 35" 16:9 flat panel (and instead _have to use_ a 11" or > 14" 4:3 screen). Trying to solve problems under such circumstances > is harder than in the common 80x25 environment due to readablilty. > But of course, YMMV applies. The trick isn't to not do it at all. The trick is to give people the option of whether to use it or not. After going through the motions of bringing this up, I think the first thing i'm going to do is teach the existing boot loader code about VESA text modes and the initialisation path about things that aren't just whatever-the-bios-initialised-it-as. There's a few things that need adding - mostly exporting some variables about the screen geometry so the forth code doesn't just assume everything is 80x25 - but it should be straightforward. I'll then work on the framebuffer support itself and making things more generic so we can use the same framebuffer support for other platforms (notably EFI booting, all the ARM stuff that's out there with a framebuffer, etc.) -adrian -adrian
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