Re: vt: Enlarge the framebuffer glyph size from 16 to 32 bits

[Helge Deller <deller@gmx.de>]

On 8/31/26 16:45, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 31, 2026 at 08:20:10 +0200, Thomas Zimmermann wrote:
>> Am 29.08.26 um 16:39 schrieb Alan Mackenzie:
>>>> This has nothing to do with KDE or Gnome, if you have issues with those
>>>> projects, please take it up with them and contribute to them to resolve
>>>> those issues.  I know they can always use the help.
> 
>>> My point is that the kernel's console is rock solid and dependable.
> 
>> That is a bold statement.
> 
> I've been using the console for around 28 years, now.  I don't recall it
> crashing at all.  My current font and keyboard files are in exactly the
> same form as they were 28 years ago.  These formats are stable and
> dependable.
> 
>> I've spend the last years working on related code (fbcon) and it
>> mostly feels dated and unmaintained. Our prime implementation (again
>> fbcon) has been de-facto unmaintained for years.  We recently had
>> contributors who are pushing the ioctls semantics and found bugs in
>> fbcon for a number of corner cases.
> 
> Something like:
> 
> commit ef7656e85f1a4400999625cd398b655517368e7e
> Author: Zizhi Wo <wozizhi@huawei.com>
> Date:   Wed Jul 29 10:12:04 2026 +0800
> 
>      fbdev: Fix out-of-bounds access when rotating console after font resize
> 
>>> Things like kmscon are subject to the vagaries of fashion.
> 
>>>>> As is clear, I think the console's limitations should be eliminated.
> 
>>>> And the rest of us feel the kernel console's code should be eliminated
>>>> entirely, when ever possible :)
> 
>>> The rest of you don't appear to be console users.  It's easy to advocate
>>> for removal when you don't use it yourself.
> 
>> FTR I'm not at all interested in eliminating the kernel's console.
> 
> Other people, in particular Greg KH, have said this is the current aim.
> I'm worried for myself.  It is far from clear that there is a suitable
> replacement for the kernel's console, and its elimination could easily
> happen without that replacement.  I suppose I could always (laboriously)
> maintain the console for myself personally.  Or there's always the BSDs.
> I just don't know what I'd do.

Alan, I really appreciate your efforts to enhance the kernel console code!
And I'm not interested to eliminate the kernel console either.

>> But there are must-have features and nice-to-have features. IMHO for
>> the kernel console i18n really belongs in the later category.
> 
> It's 2026, four decades after VGA was the latest thing, and Unicode
> support is merely a nice-to-have?
No. IMHO Unicode support would be great.

Thanks!
Helge