[systemd-devel] [PATCH v2] vconsole: default to the kernel compiled-in font

[Kay Sievers]

On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 5:55 PM, Kay Sievers <kay at vrfy.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 10:22 PM, Tom Gundersen <teg at jklm.no> wrote:
>> No longer override the default kernel font if nothing is specified in
>> vconsole.conf.
>>
>> The default kernel font[0] provides ISO-8859-1 and box characters. Users
>> of Arabic, Cyrilic or Hebrew must set a different font manually as these
>> character sets were provided by the old default font [1], but are not
>> any longer.
>>
>> Rationale:
>>
>>  * it is counter-intuitive that an empty vconsole.conf file is different
>>    from adding FONT="";
>>  * the version of the default font shipped with Arch (which is the
>>    upstream one) behaves very badly during early boot[2] (which should
>>    admittedly be fixed in the font itself);
>>  * the kernel already supplies a default font, it seems reasonable to
>>    use that unless anything else is specified;
>>  * This also avoids a needless slow call to setfont; and
>>  * We don't want to work around problems in the kernel (in case the
>>    compiled-in font is not acceptable for whatever reason).
>
> Looks good to me. Let's see what Lennart thinks.
>
> I'm convinced that we should just leave the kernel alone if there is
> no explicit configuration, the default should be no vconsole.conf
> file, and no action at all by the service. Only if things are
> specified, we should apply them.
>
> Distributions can ship these configs as needed, and any non-latin
> locale will need custom settings here anyway, so keeping the kernel's
> default sounds like the right thing here.
>
> Now there is also the keymap, which we very likely should not touch
> either without explicitly asked for. I think the same rules as for the
> font should apply here too.

Please apply this. If you like, change the keymap logic to follow the
same do-not-touch-the-defaults model.

We will ship the default setting in the distro config as needed.
Upstream should leave the kernel alone if not explicitly configured.

Thanks,
Kay