Re: console font limits

["Antonino A. Daplas" <adaplas@gmail.com>]

On Tue, 2007-05-01 at 13:49 +0200, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:
> On Tue, 1 May 2007, Albert Cahalan wrote:
> > I'm having problems with a font I just created. It's a rather big one,
> > intended for a framebuffer console in UTF-8 mode. The strace program
> > reports that /bin/setfont fails on a KDFONTOP ioctl with EINVAL.
> > In reading the kernel code, I find this:
> > 
> > vt.c:static int con_font_set(struct vc_data *vc, struct console_font_op *op)
> > vt.c-{
> > vt.c-   struct console_font font;
> > vt.c-   int rc = -EINVAL;
> > vt.c-   int size;
> > vt.c-
> > vt.c-   if (vc->vc_mode != KD_TEXT)
> > vt.c-           return -EINVAL;
> > vt.c-   if (!op->data)
> > vt.c-           return -EINVAL;
> > vt.c-   if (op->charcount > 512)
> > vt.c-           return -EINVAL;
> > 
> > Ouch. Why is the old VGA limit being applied to the framebuffer console?
> > Could this just get removed? I dearly hope we aren't still storing the
> > framebuffer data as two bytes per character+attribute pair.
> 
> The shadow screen (accessed using scr_*()) still uses the old VGA
> format.

And this will entail a lot of work to change (Is it worth it to rework
the code and remove the limitation?). The linux-console project
(http://linuxconsole.sourceforge.net/) might have , but I don't know its
current status.

Tony