hw.vga.textmode=1 and the installation media

[O'Connor, Daniel]

> On 14 Dec 2017, at 11:58, Michelle Sullivan <michelle at sorbs.net> wrote:
> 
> Eugene M. Zheganin wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> would be really nice if the 11.2 and subsequent versions would come with the hw.vga.textmode=1 as the default in the installation media. Because you know, there's a problem with some vendors (like HP) who's servers are incapable of showing graphics in IPMI with the default hw.vga.textmode=0 (yeah, I'm aware that most of the vendors don't have this issue), and there's still a bug that prevents this from being set from a loader prompt - USB keyboard doesn't work at least in 11.0 there (seems to be some sort of FreeBSD "holy cow", along with sshd starting last, after all the local daemons. I would ask again to fix the latter as I did last years, but it really seems to be a cornerstone which the FreeBSD is built upon).
> 
> Yeah the USB 'bug' has been there since FreeBSD 7/8.x I have a couple of loader command that make it work again... will let you know later when my container arrives (next week) as the details are stored on the HP blades (being transported.)  It also breaks most/all of the Softlayer consoles since 8.3(ish) - didn't manage to completely fix this as had no bios access to ensure the USB is in the correct mode.

Is there some way the loader could detect such systems and enable textmode for them?

--
Daniel O'Connor
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
 -- Andrew Tanenbaum
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