Questions and *little* bugs in new vt(9)

[Ed Maste]

On 8 May 2014 04:16, David Demelier <demelier.david at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> I'm currently trying vt(9) on a CURRENT kernel (only the kernel not the
> base). I have very small bugs, not really serious. I'm currently using the
> radeon KMS driver.
>
> * When I switch from a tty to X I can see the mouse appearing but the tty is
> still displayed until I move the mouse. Or until I wait something like 3
> seconds. It sounds like a small refresh trouble.

Interesting.  On my stable/9 desktop with i915kms I can't reproduce
this; after switching back to X the previous display is restored, and
then a redraw happens, within a few hundred mS.  I do see it on my
laptop, which also has i915kms but newer software (recent CURRENT, and
newer xorg packages).  I'll see if I can gather more information at
BSDCan next week.

> * When I don't use the native resolution (i.e the radeon firmwares are not
> loaded) switching from a tty to another results sometimes in a black screen
> when only some colors are displayed. This does not seems to appear when the
> native resolution is set.

Can you describe the corruption in some more detail, or share a
picture of it?  I haven't observed something like this with stock vt,
and the vt_vga driver.

> And some questions:
>
> * Will you add support for dead keys? I have a UK keyboard and when I want
> to write french characters like à ô ê I usually press the ` character then
> a.

This isn't currently planned, but I'll keep it in mind if I look into
future work on the keyboard input path.

> PS: this is more a personal opinion, but I really prefer the syscons font
> rather than the vt(9)'s one.

I've been using vt for about six months and am now used to the default
vt font -- the VGA ROM font looks odd to me now.  However, I believe
the primary motivation behind the font choice was the glyph coverage.
I now have a vt-compatible version of the VGA ROM font, but it only
has about half of the characters.

vt default font:

Count   %     Range                        Description
----- ----  ---------  ---------------------------------------------------
   95  74%  0000 007F  Basic Latin
   96  75%  0080 00FF  Latin-1 Supplement
  126  98%  0100 017F  Latin Extended-A
   15   7%  0180 024F  Latin Extended-B
    6   6%  0250 02AF  IPA Extensions
   10  12%  02B0 02FF  Spacing Modifier Letters
    7   6%  0300 036F  Combining Diacritical Marks
   74  51%  0370 03FF  Greek
  168  66%  0400 04FF  Cyrillic
   14   5%  1E00 1EFF  Latin Extended Additional
   38  34%  2000 206F  General Punctuation
    1   2%  2070 209F  Superscripts and Subscripts
    3   6%  20A0 20CF  Currency Symbols
    5   6%  2100 214F  Letterlike Symbols
   14  12%  2190 21FF  Arrows
   19   7%  2200 22FF  Mathematical Operators
    8   3%  2300 23FF  Miscellaneous Technical
    6   9%  2400 243F  Control Pictures
  101  79%  2500 257F  Box Drawing
   24  75%  2580 259F  Block Elements
   12  12%  25A0 25FF  Geometric Shapes
   11   4%  2600 26FF  Miscellaneous Symbols
    1   6%  FFF0 FFFF  Specials

Converted cp437-8x16 font:

Count   %     Range                        Description
----- ----  ---------  ---------------------------------------------------
   98  77%  0000 007F  Basic Latin
   55  43%  0080 00FF  Latin-1 Supplement
    1   0%  0180 024F  Latin Extended-B
   12   8%  0370 03FF  Greek
    2   2%  2000 206F  General Punctuation
    1   2%  2070 209F  Superscripts and Subscripts
    1   2%  20A0 20CF  Currency Symbols
    7   6%  2190 21FF  Arrows
    9   4%  2200 22FF  Mathematical Operators
    4   2%  2300 23FF  Miscellaneous Technical
   40  31%  2500 257F  Box Drawing
    8  25%  2580 259F  Block Elements
    9   9%  25A0 25FF  Geometric Shapes
   11   4%  2600 26FF  Miscellaneous Symbols

I expect to commit the converted font soon, and it'll be loadable at runtime.