hw.vga.acpi_ignore_no_vga=1 for installation media

[Warner Losh]

I generally like this idea... But two caveats...

First, we'd need to update the docs so that folks doing serial installs can
unset it.... Though serial installs are a weird beast....
Second, if it's really needed, we should have the installer generate it.
alas, only vt can tell us that, but it should be easy to add a sysctl to it
that says that it has done video by ignoring the absence of the vga node...

Warner

On Sun, Mar 17, 2019 at 6:58 AM Leon Christopher Dietrich <
doralitze at chaotikum.org> wrote:

> Sound's like solid idea.
>
> A lot of systems out there lack propper ACPI description for VGA and it
> would definitly make the installation on such a system much more easy.
>
> As far as I can tell it doesn't seam to break other things and even low
> power system without VGA (like a pcengines apu2) don't seam to suffer.
>
> On 17.03.19 13:00, FreeBSD-stable-request at freebsd.org wrote:
> > Date: Sun, 17 Mar 2019 02:59:12 +0700
> > From: Eugene Grosbein <eugen at grosbein.net>
> > To: FreeBSD stable <freebsd-stable at freebsd.org>
> > Subject: hw.vga.acpi_ignore_no_vga=1 for installation media
> > Message-ID: <912fc95d-5a5e-012b-7385-0f43f50dca65 at grosbein.net>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=koi8-r
> >
> > Hi!
> >
> > Since 11.2-RELESE, default console driver vt(4) checks ACPI table for
> presence of VGA in the system.
> > It does not initialize console (no input, no output) if ACPI states
> there is no VGA adapter.
> >
> > There are PRs describing many cases when VGA is present but ACPI lies
> > and we have a regression compared with 11.1 and earlier:
> > FreeBSD cannot be installed interactively onto such a system, leaving
> aside serial console.
> >
> > vt(4) has loader knob to restore pre-11.2 behaviour and ignore ACPI:
> >
> > hw.vga.acpi_ignore_no_vga=1
> >
> > Should we add this unconditionally to the installation media designed
> for interactive VGA-based installation?
> >
> >
> > ------------------------------
> >
>
>