Hello, some of you probably noticed a bunch of commits in rasops, wscons etc. regarding support for anti-aliased fonts in the console. There are three drivers which support this so far: - genfb, if it finds a 32bit framebuffer - ffb - voyagerfb with options VOYAGERFB_ANTIALIAS To test this on your hardware you need to: 1. add an anti-aliased font to your kernel config: * options FONT_DEJAVU_SANS_MONO12x22 # Helvetica-ish font * options FONT_DROID_SANS_MONO12x22 # Google's Droid font * options FONT_FREEMONO12x22 # Times lookalike They were all generated from TrueType fonts found in pkgsrc, I'll commit the converter at some point, it's kinda rough right now. Leave at least one bitmap font in as a fallback for drivers that don't support alpha fonts, for now that's still the majority. 2. with genfb, make sure it finds a 32bit framebuffer ( on x86 pick an appropriate VESA mode ), with voyagerfb add options VOYAGERFB_ANTIALIAS, with ffb do nothing 3. rebuild your kernel, boot it, stare at a console that looks an order of magnitude better ;)
So far ffb is the only driver which does all the alpha blending work by hardware, in genfb it's all software and voyagerfb is halfway between - the hardware doesn't support alpha blending but we can still use the blitter to draw characters ( and thus avoid having to access framebuffer memory directly which would require syncing the drawing engine ) All the new fonts use ISO encoding, support for auto-generated box drawing characters has been added. have fun Michael
