UTF-8 on 8.0-CURRENT: Yes We Can!

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (Jul 14), Ed Schouten said:
> * Vladimir Grebenschikov <vova at fbsd.ru> wrote:
> > In past graphical console draw text not too quick.  I've tried to live
> > with VESA mode of sc (to match high resolution of notebook display). 
> > But it was really slow.  Probably, your driver will be much faster ?
> 
> Even though I like VESA, it's probably hard, if not impossible to get it
> working, mainly because we need vm86 to reprogram the hardware, which is
> not present on amd64.  One of the things on my todo list is to figure out
> how the Intel hardware works, so we have an accelerated driver on those
> systems.  This should also make it a lot more attractive to implement
> things like kernel modesetting somewhere in the future.

Another option would be to dynamically remap the 256 text-mode characters as
needed, similar to how the mouse cursor is displayed.  The average
single-language console will have much less than 256 unique characters
onscreen at once at any one time, so the average console will rarely have a
phyical character remapped once a glyph has been assigned to it.  Any more
than 256 onscreen at once could be replaced with a special symbol or
remapped to a similar character if possible.  You could even preferentially
replace symbol/line-drawing characters first, and try and preserve
characters in the area around the cursor.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com