Linux 6.9 To Allow Larger Frame-Buffer Console Font Size For Today's 4K Displays

[reba]

Making this comment without actually having looked into whether it's possible, but is there a reason we can't have integer scaling for vt fonts? I see the appeal of having larger resolution fonts as well, because smoother is always nicer, but having hardcoded limits doesn't really seem to make sense to me.

You could run cage with e.g. foot. This gives you the ability to size the font any way you like, have antialiasing, etc., at the price of running a small compositor.

[uid313]

But can it run at 144 Hz? With variable refresh rate (VRR)? 32-bit colors (8 bpp)?

I remember back in the days when I used Slackware in 1995, there was this software called GPM which let you use the mouse in the virtual console.

[reba]

I remember back in the days when I used Slackware in 1995, there was this software called GPM which let you use the mouse in the virtual console.

cage has mouse support, too, it's a very small Wayland kiosk compositor. Your ole GPM is probably something alike, just probably nonstandard and therefore lost in time.

[Serafean]

Just tried kmscon - it's pretty cool. Looks like it's not maintained though (last commits - 2014) and there are some minor bugs. That's unfortunate.

forked and updated:

https://github.com/Aetf/kmscon

[szymon_g]

there is still a week or so till the 1st of April.

[Rovano]

But can it run at 144 Hz? With variable refresh rate (VRR)? 32-bit colors (8 bpp)?

I remember back in the days when I used Slackware in 1995, there was this software called GPM which let you use the mouse in the virtual console.

I think it's more important to see something. Than to see nothing in case of problems.
So I'll prefer the simpler solution over the fashion.

There was also a mouse and other things in DOS. And what?

More complex things like UEFI brought the malware below. So you have malware and you don't even know it's running somewhere.
Or it is used as a back door.

What I mean by this is that having everything at once leads to this phenomenon.

[Brane215]

"setfont -d"

[DanaG]

`dpkg-reconfigure console-setup`

But that debconf script will probably need to be updated to handle the new, larger size limit.

[Setif]

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GRUB/Tips_and_tricks#Setting_the_framebuffer_resolution

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GRUB/Tips_and_tricks#Background_image_and_bitmap_fonts

That's one of the tricks that no longer work.
GRUB_GFXMODE doesn't work
pf2 font should be signed IIRC, but Ubuntu doesn't sign it.

[EphemeralEft]

Different sizes for different monitors too, please. Oh, and one of my monitors is rotated so can we please have the text the correct orientation on that one monitor but not the other.!

Adding fbcon=rotate:<0-3> to your boot arguments might do what you're looking for.

I know, I'm expecting too much out of my framebuffer. It does it's dumb stupid job and I should stop complaining!

I love how simple it is, but I just wish individual displays had their own framebuffer devices. As things currently are, all monitors connected to the same graphics card show the same framebuffer, and the framebuffer is sized for the smallest screen. All multi-head software (Gnome, KDE, etc) uses KMS, but many framebuffer drivers use KMS internally, so I don't understand that limitation. RaspberryPis seem to have that feature, but nothing else does...

My GPU has 4 display outputs, please let me use them! I don't care about acceleration, I just want to pass framebuffer devices to my systemd-nspawn containers to add seats to my server. Basically everyone who wants a multi-seat setup currently needs multiple graphics cards, which is so inefficient and unnecessary.

If GPU manufacturers could stop disabling SR-IOV to segment the enterprise market, that would be fine too.