Unicode-based FreeBSD

[Alexander Churanov]

2008/8/29 Peter Wemm <peter at wemm.org>

> syscons does operate in graphics mode.  The problem is how to get into
> graphics mode in the first place.  On i386, it is done with vesa bios
> calls.  We don't have a way to do this on amd64 systems.  It can be
> done but is Very Difficult in kernel mode like on i386.
>
> Peter,

Thank you for the information. I haven't been examining rendering part of
syscons before. Also my opinion about not working on unicode rendering
support now become stronger. There are many issues. For now I am considering
only implementing UTF-8 support in syscons to make possible to use UTF-8 by
default in releases.

Sample schedule:

1) Implement support for UTF-8 in syscons with mapping UTF-8 to 256
characters for rendering. The rest of characters will not be displayed
correctly, however proper backspacing, character counts and other things
like that will work. This is clearly better than what we have now.

2) Proceed with design discussion and cost estimation for implementing
rendering more than 256 glyphs at a time. This will only affect rendering.

Alexander Churanov