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

[Kay Sievers]

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.

Thanks,
Kay