HEADS UP: Enabling vt(4) by default

[Jean-Sébastien Pédron]

Hello!

vt(4) is fairly usable today and we would like to enable it by default
in one week (Monday November 3, 2014).

For those who never used vt(4), here are its benefits:
    o  It supports Unicode and double-width characters.
    o  It supports the kernel video drivers (KMS) and allows to switch
       to and from an X session.
    o  It supports UEFI.

Of course, there are still issues. A list is available on the wiki:
https://wiki.freebsd.org/Newcons#Known_Issues

And in Bugzilla:
https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?resolution=---&keywords=vt

Here's a summary of the major problems:
    o  The keymap selection in bsdconfig(8), used by the installer, has
       not been updated to use the vt keymap list instead of the syscons
       one.
    o  Only UTF-8 character maps.
    o  The console resolution is currently fixed to the value chosen by
       the underlying graphics driver.
    o  No support for several vidcontrol(1) features.
    o  Graphics features such as mouse pointers and font setting work
       only in VGA graphics mode, not in VGA text mode.

The goal is to fix remaining bugs in time before FreeBSD 11.0 release cycle.

If you want to switch back to syscons, you may use the following line in
/boot/loader.conf:
    kern.vty=sc

And please tell us why! :)

-- 
Jean-Sébastien Pédron

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