Re: What made You think You could just kill graphics in singleuser

On Wed, Sep 17, 2025 at 6:54 AM Peter 'PMc' Much <
pmc@citylink.dinoex.sub.org> wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 17, 2025 at 03:01:54PM +0200, Danilo Pecher wrote:
> ! I'm not trying to put too fine a point on it, but it might be worth
> ! thinking why there are so many 'stressful issues' within FreeBSD
> ! lately. Ever since FBSD12 the system has been the IT equivalent of
> ! gambling. You might get lucky, you might not. If a new version ends up
> ! working is a complete crap shoot, even on systems that are several
> ! years old and should therefore be supported. This lack of reliability
> ! is the reason why I walked away from it.
>
> Sorry, Danilo, but You didn't get the point. This here is not about
> "stressful items" or whatever.
>
> It is about a deliberate decision to change system defaults in a
> way as certain commercial powers want it, no matter whether that
> implies beating up some ordinary users like me.
>

man src.conf
...
    WITHOUT_LOADER_BIOS_TEXTONLY
             Include graphics, font and video mode support in the i386 and
             amd64 BIOS boot loader.
...

So you can rebuild the boot loader to get this back. As noted elsewhere,
space is extremely limited on /boot/loader for BIOS systems. The size of
ZFS has been expanding for years, and something had to give in order to
accomodate ZFS growth. ZFS has been adding new crypto and compression
algorithms as an astound rate. Due to the boot loader needing to run in a
variety of systems (some of which have more limited space than the defaults
due to their hardware installing BIOS extensions for things like disk
support needed to boot), the graphics support needed to go by default. Many
system will still fit, so enabling the above option will restore this.

You are correct, though, that I neglected to put it in UPDATING or RELNOTES
it seems. At least I can't find it right now. That's a fair knock on me.

Warner